Cherry Pie, sucesses and issues

17 years ago

I've asked a lot of questions on this forum and it seems only fair to report back on "big events":)

I made Cherry pie for T-day after thinking about it forever.

I've already forgot a lot of the success and issues I initially had since I've been slow to post but.......,

Filling:

I used about 1/3 Michigan tart cherries home frozen in some sugar and about 2/3 Trader Joe's packed in light syrup (these are highly touted by America's Test Kitchen). Because they came with some sugar I was a bit at a loss on how much sugar to add in addition - I thought it tasted ok, my Mother thought it was tart.

In order to get around past problems with too much juice from the cherries I did the pre-evaporation or reduction method. I was really happy with this other than the confusion on how much of the reduced juice to use in the end.

I drained the cherries pretty thoroughly. Put the juice on a low burner and reduced by almost 2/3s. I still had more juice than I really needed left for the pie but wasn't sure how much to add........I guesstimated and about halfway cooking the pie I thought it looked too dry, wasn't bubbling enough so panic'ed pulled it out and poured a little more in. I think it turned out ok, you can see in the picture that its not runny, but it could have been maybe a little moister. The discoloration on the lattice is from pouring the juice.

I'm not that big a fan of almond extract so I did a tsp (or tblsp?) of vanilla and then 1/8 of almond. I also added a little lemon juice, a very small amt of cinnamon and went quite light on that "pats of butter" thing. I think the flavor was good and I think I'll stick with that.

Crust: I used Alton Brown's recipe that included a couple of tablespoons of lard (to 6 of butter). The lard I used was home rendered leaf lard that everyone is on about all over the web. I got the leaf lard from a butcher where they butcher hogs on site.

Well it seemed kinda flaky - but I'm not sure it wasn't crumbly not flaky - I think sometimes people confuse the two. And I'm not sure it was what I would call "tender". I didn't like the lard flavor at all when I had a mouthful of plain crust. How could 2 tblspoons make such a difference? I'm wondering if I either rendered it at too high a heat or it was in the refrigerator too long or maybe I just don't like the flavor (which would be too bad because I'm really trying for flaky and tender)

When making the crust it seemed quite dry coming out of the bowl and patting into a shape for cooling in the fridge. But when rolling it out between two sheets of wax paper it was really quite sticky and I had a terrible time. I either didn't use enough flour on the was paper or too much water but I measured (1/4 cup which = 4 tbls) into a glass salt shaker and that was all I used - and it didn't seem wet coming out of the bowl.

I cooked it in a pyrex dish set directly on a pampered chef baking stone which got me a nicely browned bottom.

All in all not bad but I think requires more tweaking and/or practice till its "blue ribbon fair pie".

A possible future experiement: if acidity makes for tenderness in crust (why some recipe's use vinegar) why not replace water with orange juice? Sugar increases browning so orange juice has some nature sugar so that could be a benefit (or an issue). The flavor might be a nice layer.

Ok I tried posting a link from TinyPic after searching for directs and still can't figure out why its not working. Anyone?

Here it is for manual looks

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