Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

This pie contains both lard and vodka.

This week was the first week of the Enterprise farm share, and they sent us rhubarb and strawberries.

(Long-time readers may remember last year's eight ways not to make rhubarb pie. Having learned my lesson, I followed recipes this year.)

The pie filling is Smitten Kitchen's "Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie, Improved," which recipe I followed pretty much to the letter, and which I am abashed to report turned out entirely delicious. The unexpected ingredient was instant tapioca, which turns the otherwise runny mess of strawberries and rhubarb into a proper pie filling. (Our strawberries weren't very sweet, so if I had a do-over, I might add a smidge more sugar.)

The crust directions came from Smitten Kitchen's "Pie Crust 101," which uses Cook's Illustrated's "Foolproof Pie Dough" recipe. The secret ingredient is vodka (which provides moisture for mixing the crust, but doesn't toughen it like water, and evaporates in the oven). I substituted half a cup of lard for the half cup of vegetable shortening called for (influenced by this extraordinarily thorough New York Times investigation of various pie crust fats). With neither a food processor nor a pastry blender, I settled in for the tedium of cutting the butter and lard into little pieces and then using two knives to cut them into the flour.

Above is what the pie look likes if you ignore Smitten Kitchen's instruction to let the pie cool and the tapioca  set up for several hours. Because -- seriously -- who makes a pie and then doesn't eat it for several hours?

Later slices, more cool-headedly taken from the refrigerator, were as solid and lovely as one might hope.

How Not to Make a Rhubarb Pie

 

1. Abdicate making pie crust. I have this idea that pie crust is hard to make. (Could it be the Internet foodnoscenti proclaiming "freeze and grate your butter," "use ice water," "don't look at the dough too hard, or it will turn out tough"?) Despite knowing that a seven year old can make pie crust (the Brownie cooking Try-It requires making an apple pie, and my mom scoffed at the handbook's instruction to use a premade pie crust), I still avoid it.

2. Substitute cream cheese for butter. So, I have this recipe for a easy cookie/tartlet crust that I use when I have to fake a (small) pie crust. It calls for 8 ounces of butter and 3 ounces of cream cheese. I had 3 ounces of butter and 8 ounces of cream cheese. I think you can see where this is going.

3. Substitute cake flour for all-purpose (or pastry) for no earthly reason. I can't explain this one. I looked at the baking shelf, saw a few different kinds of flour, and made a dumb choice. To compound the error, I added lots of extra flour, because the dough came out really sticky (see #2). According to this site, the problem is that cake flour doesn't have enough protein to form a workable dough.

4. Switch horses midstream. My original plan was to make individual-size pies in ramekins (for which my faked unrollable cookie/tartlet crust might have worked), but when I saw how much filling I was going to have, I decided to make a full-size pie. The dough was sticky and completely unrollable, which I attribute to a combination of #1, #2, and #3.

5. Omit adding any thickeners. Apparently rhubarb pie often includes flour, cornstarch, or tapioca to thicken the filling. I did not know this when I made my filling. I probably poured a quarter cup of liquid off my pie before putting it in the oven (it sat around macerating for a while before I baked it) and another quarter cup before serving. It was still ... not of a pielike consistency. (Chowhound addresses the issue, and suggests that fresh spring farmer's market rhubarb is more watery than summer rhubarb.)
 

6. Make a closed-top pie. This wasn't the original plan, but I had a lot of pie dough (see: adding lots of extra flour in #3), so I made a top crust. Michael Ruhlman says you make rhubarb pie either with no top crust or with a lattice so that extra liquid can bubble off. Huh.
 

7. Don't use a recipe. Many nice rhubarb pie recipes exist in the world. Here's one from Smitten Kitchen. Looking at a picture of a rhubarb pie that your brother's girlfriend posted on Facebook turns out not to be a completely adequate substitute. See #1-6.
 

8. Turn off the oven midway through pie baking. Not that you would, but our (new, fancy, digital) oven is a little complicated to use. I was sort of distracted when I got up to check the pie and reset the timer halfway through cooking. What can I say?

One thing I did do right? Throw in a big handful of frozen peaches we picked at Smolak Farms last summer. Yum.

I'm too embarrassed to show you what the pie looked like ("crumble" would be charitable), but it was still scarfed up. Vanilla ice cream helped. (I ate the last piece for breakfast the next day, another thing my mom taught me.)