Triple Cherry

Yum, cherries.  They come in sweet, sour, tart, semi-sweet, red, black, or yellow.    If you can manage not to eat them as soon as you buy them, they make a pretty good pie too.   They can be expensive, even when they are in season.  In order to thin the cost a bit, I like to use a couple of different kinds of cherries: frozen, dried, and fresh.

Using three kinds of cherries allows you to choose more than one variety and mix a sweet Bing or Rainier with a tart cherry like a Royal Ann.  I like a sweeter pie, so I used a combination of frozen Bing and fresh Rainier with dried sour cherries.  I originally started using dried cherries in pies to help them stand up.  I tried to convince my husband they were supposed run all over the plate, but he remained skeptical.  Recently, I have discovered a miracle for thickening the pie juice.

Instant Clear Gel  works wonders and doesn't seem to need nearly as much added to the pie as I usually have to with traditional thickeners, like cornstarch.  (I purchased mine from King Arthur Flour, but a lot of companies make it.)  I understand that some people also use Minute Tapioca as a thickener, with good results.  I haven't personally tried it, but I'll experiment on a future pie.

I have found many recipes that call for frozen fruit and instruct you to just bake longer.  They haven't worked well for me.  I always end up with either a runny pie or a burnt crust.  I defrosted my frozen cherries overnight in the refrigerator and drained them.  Since I also used fresh cherries, I thought I would end up with plenty of juice in the pie.  The Rainiers need to be washed, stemmed, and pitted.  I set my five-year old to de-stemming while I mixed the clear gel with 3/4 of a cup of sugar.  A sour cherry pie calls for 1 1/4 cups of sugar, but I used sweet cherries, so I reduced the amount.  Mixing the clear gel with the sugar before adding the fruit keeps the thickener from clumping up.

I coated the defrosted fruit with the sugar mixture first, then added the fresh cherries.  I cut them directly into the bowl, pitting as I went.  This step is also a great reason for combining frozen or dried fruit with fresh.  It takes a long time to pit cherries.  Make sure you are paying attention - not admiring art projects or discussing work with your spouse - knives are sharp.

Thankfully, I was accident-free during this baking session.  This was the first time I used fresh Rainiers.  I really liked how much more firm they are than Bing cherries.  I ended up with less juice on me and more in the pie.  I stirred in these and then added the dried cherries.  I'll note here that you should end up with 5-6 cups of fruit for a 9" pie.  I had closer to 6 1/2 cups, because I didn't want to end up with part of a bag of frozen cherries in my freezer.  That was a mistake - you'll see why later.

Once all the cherries were coated, I poured it into a pie shell.  Almost any double-crust pastry crust can be paired with a cherry pie.  I used a recipe that has worked for me in the past: Secret Ingredient: Vodka Crust.  (I'll show you the crust in a separate post.)  Oooo - looks pretty, right?

My husband - the traditionalist with his abhorrence of soupy pie - suggested a lattice top.  The lattice top is fairly iconic.  It makes me think of pie cooling on a window sill.  (Although I'm not sure anyone ever actually did that.  They always seem to get stolen that way in cartoons.)  The hardest part about a lattice top is getting the strips to look uniform.  That is not something I can do.  Instead, I decided to go with the flow and intentionally make my strips varying widths.

I rolled out the second half of my double-crust dough fairly thin, about 1/8 of an inch.  I used a paring knife to cut the dough.  I cut right on the parchment paper that I rolled the dough out on.  This paper is backed with foil, making it great for cutting on without marking up the counter.  The dough peels off of the parchment side easily.  I laid all of the vertical strips first and then folded every other strip up and put down a horizontal piece.

The horrible looking cookie sheet makes it easier to put the pie in the oven and take it out with out sticking an oven mitt in the pie.  I promise this is the only pan I have that looks this bad.

It also catches drips if the pie bubbles over the edge.  I promise most of my pans don't look this bad.

Then I laid all of the vertical pieces down and folded up the opposite vertical strips.  Rinse and Repeat.

Okay, most of my pans look this bad.  That's a sign of a productive cook, right?

Once the lattice is all laid, I crimped the edges.  That just involves squishing all of the leftover bits hanging off the edge into the bottom crust where it sticks up above the top of the pie plate.  Pre-made pie crusts have a very uniform, crenelated appearance.  I don't worry about making mine look even.  It is next to impossible and the unevenness proves it is homemade.

The pie needed to bake for a total of 55 minutes.  It started at 375 F for 30 minutes.  It is VERY important to cover the edge of the pie for the first baking.  Trust me on this.  Learn from my mistakes.  You can use 3-5 strips of tin foil, each strip should be about 4 inches wide, to cover the edge of the pie.  I broke down about a year ago and purchased a silicone pie shield.  It covers the edge perfectly on a 9" pie and is easy to remove without smacking my hand against the top of the oven of sticking the thumb of my oven mitt into the pie.

I recommend that you use an oven mitt, not a tea towel, to move your molten-lava-hot oven racks.  Yeah, we're all about safety in my kitchen.  Also: the little squares on the baking sheet next to the pie are leftover pie crust.  I sprinkled them with cinnamon sugar.  They only need to bake about 15 minutes.  My kids love them.

After 30 minutes, I removed the foil or pie shield and turned down the heat.  The pie needed to bake for another 25 minutes.

The crust still looks raw in this photo.  In reality, it was a little more baked-looking.  However, the point of the pie shield is to prevent the crust from baking faster than the pie filling.  So nearly raw dough at this stage is good.  I checked the liquid in the pie when I pulled off the shield and it wasn't even close to boiling.  I noted above that I use clear gel, instead of cornstarch, as a thickener.  It does work better - but it isn't the most important part of a firm pie.  The liquid has to boil to make the sugar in the fruit, and the sugar I added for sweetness, condense into a thick syrup.  Basically, I'm trying to cook off the water.  To help the crust get a nice golden-brown, I used a pastry brush to wipe half-and-half across the top.  Then I sprinkled it with granulated sugar - just for pretty.

After 25 minutes, it still wasn't bubbling the way I wanted.  The crust had started to brown nicely, and I didn't want it to burn, so I put the silicone shield back on and put it back into the oven for another 15 minutes.

Ahh, bubbly cherry perfection.  Sort of.  You can see here why I shouldn't have put in the extra 3/4 of a cup of defrosted cherries.  The liquid bubbled up over the crust along one side.  It will still taste the same, but it doesn't look as pretty.  Fortunately, it didn't go over the edge of the pie.  But if it had, I had the baking sheet ready to catch any spills.

I let the pie sit overnight before cutting it.  My cookbook recommends that you let a pie cool before slicing, which would be about two hours, but you can slice it sooner if you are sure that it won't run.  I'm always nervous about the consistency of my fruit pies, so I wanted to make certain it would be completely cooled.  (You can always cheat and reheat in the oven or microwave if you want warm pie.)

Not too shabby.  Next, the experts will review the taste.  I'm on tenterhooks.

                                                                                            - the Headless Cook