Peach and Blueberry Pies

The peaches at MarketBasket smelled good last week so I thought it was a good time to finally use my frozen pie shells. And blueberries were on sale so I thought maybe two pies. I've never really gotten into making my own pie crust. It seems like a lot of work for something that is not much better tasting than the frozen shells and looks considerably less professional.



I go to Mark Bittman first for most things, to get a base recipe to start from, and usually to Best Recipes for a little discussion of some of the attributes to think about. Both peach and berry pies suggested some sort of thickener, with various pure starches recommended: corn, potato, tapioca. Standard pie spices cinnamon and nutmeg were included and some sugar and lemon juice and zest. All this sounded good, though the sugar seemed excessive, and I doubled the lemon juice in the peach pie. I used corn starch, which was least recommended but seemed perfectly acceptable in the end.

Peeling the peaches proved to be quite a messy operation. Despite warnings from the cookbooks I skipped blanching and used a vegetable peeler, which worked just fine, though peeling twelve small peaches took a while. And was made that much more complicated because I had Miriam pulling herself up on my pants most of the time. She was remarkably content to open and close the cabinets for the half hour it took to put the pies together. It was her first time trying blueberries, which she didn't quite parse as food, even after she had tasted them. She tended to hold a blueberry in her hand, gently enough that it didn't burst, for 10-15 minutes at a time. They get quite dark and shiny when you do that.

If I'm just making one pie I'll use two frozen pie shells, one as a base and one as a top, but for two pies I needed an alternative topping. I found a lovely sounding crumble topping in the apple crumble recipe in my Alice Waters cookbook, with ground nuts and spiced and sweetened flour cut with butter in approximately 2:1, dry mix:butter. The food processor didn't work as well as I hoped so I ended up pinching it into form and making a lovely mess. It didn't look like quite enough for both pies so I added some chopped pecans into the mix. I don't know who got me these pecans, but they were great, not a hint of mustiness and with a lovely toothiness.

This pie shells filled in nicely, with the blueberry looking a little low and the peach a little high, and the topping packing on in beautiful chunks. I pushed any raised bits down to avoid burning the nuts. They went in a 450 oven on a heavy baking sheet on the lowest rack to try to get the frozen crust bottom to crisp up before it soaked too much fruity goo. After 15 minutes I turned it down to 375 and left it for another 40 minutes until it was dark and bubbly. I usually have a problem with burning the crust but this seemed to work beautifully.

They inspired a lovely impromptu backyard picnic. The lemon zest in the blueberry was a great note and the lowered sweetness and pecans make for a sense of sophistication I don't normally associate with these yeoman pies. I'll cut back a bit on the corn starch in the blueberry and underfill the peach next time.