A beginner tries strawberry pie

Last year, I saw the movie Waitress twice, and was utterly inspired to make pie.  To become an expert at pie, like the main character – a pie master.  Until now, I never really tried, for perfectly valid reasons:

Pie is intimidating.

It’s very intimidating to me, and I’m pretty bold about trying things I might ruin, at least as far as cooking goes.  It should be in my blood, since my grandmother made the most perfect pies you can imagine – but it’s not, or at least it doesn’t come naturally.

I had to make pie this week, though, because I bought entirely too many strawberries at the farmer’s market.  I did it on purpose, because I heard whispering that strawberry season was almost over, and I knew that I just had to do it.  I had to make strawberry rhubarb pie.  So I got more than I could comfortably use for anything less than a pie, invited some friends over specifically to help eat pie, and I was committed.

If you’re feeling terribly concerned, I’ll give away the ending: Buttercup lives.  The pie is delicious.  But it’s not without its share of mishaps, and even with some rescuing it’s still not a pie like Grandma would make.

For the first step, I made the dough the night before.  This, I believe, is a recommended practice.  I dutifully followed the notes in my Joy of Cooking, being careful to add just enough water that the dough could be squeezed into a ball.  It made a rough, crumbly sort of ball, but it held together, so it fit how I read the recipe.  Like so many things in cooking, no amount of description will tell you how it should really look and feel – the only way to know is to see and feel the real thing.  I wasn’t sure if I had it quite right, but I was wary of making it too wet.  Best not to end up with a too-wet crust!

So this evening, after I made the filling (the easy part!), I let the dough warm up and tried to roll it.  It crumbled into big, dry pieces.  I let it warm a little more and tried again.  No improvement.  By that time, my friends had arrived, and two of us together started working some water into the dough to get it smooth enough that we could roll it.

End result: it was too wet anyway, and over-handled to boot.  Handling the dough melts the butter and helps develop gluten, just like kneading bread.  So the crust ended up more on the chewy side than the crumbly side.  Plus the venting holes I cut sealed themselves up, and none of the juice steamed out.

But… it was delicious.  I haven’t had a strawberry pie in way too long, and we devoured it.  It helped that they were really good strawberries, too!  It was good enough, it turns out, that I’m inspired to try again.  I’ve learned at least one lesson – the dough should be moister than I made it, before you chill it.  But I also learned that, while it’s a bit complex and takes some time, pie isn’t really that hard.  It’s hard to get it perfect, but not hard to make something really good.  After all, if you get it wrong, at worst you’re back where you started.  And if you get it right, you get pie.  Sounds like a good deal to me!