After a long hiatus, I am back in the kitchen making pies again. I love June in Ohio for all the local produce available, like fresh strawberries and rhubarb.
Oddly enough, I actually had never made a pie with locally grown strawberries before this year, using only grocery store varieties for a strawberry rhubarb pie I made once. However, I am on a mission to up my pie game this year and am working my way through Erin Jeanne McDowell’s The Book on Pie. I thought her roasted strawberry pie recipe would be the perfect opportunity to work with strawberries again.
Additionally, this recipe would give me the opportunity to work on skills I am weak at: cooking fruit and making par-baked crust.
Baking Roasted Strawberry Pie
Par-Baked Pie Crust
I am not going to re-type Erin’s recipe here, but simply give you the gist of what I did. First things first, the par-baked crust. I actually ended up baking two because the first crust was dry and cracked:
My second attempt was better-hydrated and usable. However, I still wasn’t please with it because I noticed butter (like always) had leaked out of the crust during baking. For record-keeping purposes, here is what I used and what I’d tweak next time:
- Used ceramic Emile Henry dish. Next time I will use my metal pie plate.
- Had pizza stone in oven pre-heated for one hour, but did not sit dish directly on pizza stone. Next time, I will sit directly on pizza stone.
- Cooled crust in pie plate in refrigerator for 45 minutes before baking. Next time I will cool for at least one hour, maybe even two.
- Used gold metal flour and Heinen’s (local grocery store) butter. Will likely keep this the same, since I’ve been successful with this combination before.
- Cooked for 15 minutes with pie weights, another 3 minutes without weights. Looking back, I think it could have baked for a bit longer, so will probably add on a couple more minutes without weights next time.
Make a Lemon Zest Sugar Mixture to Top the Strawberries
This was by far the easiest part of my day. I used the super fun Microplane Zester to zest my entire lemon very quickly and efficiently. I also set aside 149 grams (why not 150g?) of sugar with a half-teaspoon of salt. I mixed it all together and tossed the it with the strawberries in the pans.
Roast the Strawberries
I ran out of steam after making two crusts to also cook the strawberries, which needed to roast in the oven for 3-4 hours per the recipe. Therefore, I did this the next day. Since there was a sale at Heinen’s, I bought 5 containers of strawberries there, slicing or dicing them according to the recipes to equate to around 1500 grams.
I prepared two trays of strawberries on aluminum foil to roast in the oven, not realizing that the type I bought wouldn’t roast well at all. Unfortunately, the big mass-produced strawberries I bought, while great for snacking, barely gave off any juice. By the end of three hours, they were way too dark and tiny amount of juice emitted turned into hard candy.
I didn’t take any photos of this sorry state. We did saved the roasted strawberries to perhaps put in oatmeal because they didn’t taste bad. There simply was no juice to speak of, so I decided to start again.
This time we headed to the farmer’s market and bought three quarts of organic strawberries at $8 whopping bucks a piece. However, I was convinced that these would work better and I was right!
First off, many of them were so small that I only needed to top them. They are also sweeter and naturally have a more condensed flavor them the large ones at the store that are apparently mostly water. However, I didn’t quite get it right with these either since I was scarred from my first attempt and went way too conservative.
I took the strawberries out of the oven after one and a half hours because I felt the much more abundant juices were already getting syrupy. So many of my past fruit cooking attempts have ended in rock hard caramel that I was thinking if I went more conservative, they’d at least be edible. I was sort of on the right track, but still not quite there.
The better quality strawberries continued to release juice while sitting in the bowl and did not thicken much after cooling completely. Next time, I will probably purchase these pricey strawberries again, but stick truer to Erin’s recipe with the 3-4 hour roasting time. If you are set on using grocery store strawberries, I would expect less juice and a shorter required roasting time – maybe like two hours tops.
Unfortunately, I did not roast this batch of strawberries enough, so they went into my par-baked crust to finish baking a bit too liquidy. I’m not sure if the par-baked crust’s bottom wasn’t crisp enough or there were just too many juices or maybe all the above, but the bottom turned out exceedingly soggy.
. . .
I so much want to call this pie a failure, but I know I should do that. The strawberries actually ended up being super delicious – I just wish the crust turned out crisper. Next time, I will also make a batch of whipped cream to top it with!