Eli Cooks » pie

Cherry Hand Pies

Eli — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:00:33 +0000

As soon as I publicly admitted that I’m not very good at making pie crusts and don’t have a recipe I really like, I knew I had to change that. (Truth be told, and bacon apple pie aside, I’ve avoided pies for years because of my crust-phobia.) Then I heard these cherries calling to me from across the farmer’s market. There were just two boxes of bright red Michigan sour cherries sitting among the bings, and I heard them calling just in time to watch one leave with someone else. My fate was sealed. I quickly swooped in to grab the last box. Afterall, what better way to end a pie drought than with cherry pie? Now I just needed a crust.

I turned to The Pie and Pastry Bible as a likely place to find a good pie crust. I quickly settled on the Flaky Cream Cheese crust, and as I was skimming the instructions, a thought came to me. I’ve known about the food processor method for pie crusts, but I’ve never owned a food processor, so I’ve just discounted it. But what I do have is a mini food processor chopper thing. (Something like this.) Why couldn’t I just do the pie crust in that? Sure, it’s small, but maybe I could do the crust in batches. And you know what? It worked. And was surprisingly easy at that.

The crust came out tender AND flaky. It rained little flakes of pie crust with every bite, just like a good pie crust should. Now that I have a good recipe, I need to start making up for lost time. Luckily, I still have a good bit of summer left to make more fruit pies. (I’ve always liked fruit pies best.)

And I’m glad I gave the hand pies a whirl as well. They’re like what a Hostess pie would be if it wasn’t made entirely of shortening and chemicals. Which is to say delicious, portable and perfectly sized. Great for a picnic or a quick breakfast, if you’re so inclined. (Hey, they’re full of fruit, so that makes them good for you, right?)

Cherry Hand Pies
I got to try out my new pastry cloth on this recipe, and it really does make rolling out dough MUCH easier. At $6, it’s well worth the money.

Flaky Cream Cheese Crust (recipe below)
1 1/2 lb (about 1 quart) fresh sour cherries, pitted
2/3 cup sugar
2 1/2 Tbsp cornstarch
pinch salt

Preheat the oven to 400 F. Mix the cherries, sugar, cornstarch, salt and any cherry juice. Set aside.

Roll out the pastry crust to about 1/8″ thick. Use a ring cutter to cut the pastry into 4 to 5″ circles. (I used the largest ring from my set of cutters, which is 4 7/16″.)

Transfer the pastry circles to a baking sheet and spoon a bit of the cherry mixture onto each circle. About 6-8 cherries will fit on one circle, if you want it to close.

Fold one side of the circle over onto the other side to make a half circle. Use a fork to crimp and seal the edges. (If a bit of juice leaks out, don’t worry too much. It will bake up into a chewy/crispy cherry carmel. Just peel it off the pan and eat it.) Cut a few slits into each pie to allow the steam to escape.

Bake the pies for 30 minutes, or until the crust is golden and the juice is thick and bubbling out of the slits.

Flaky Cream Cheese Pastry Crust
Adapted from The Pie and Pastry Bible

8 Tbsp unsalted butter, cold
1 1/3 cup AP flour
1/8 tsp salt
1/8 tsp baking powder
3 oz cream cheese, cold
1 1/2 Tbsp cold water
1 1/2 Tsp cider vinegar

Freeze the butter for about 30 minutes, until very firm. Toss the butter, flour, salt and baking powder into a chopper or food processor and pulse until combined. The texture should be like sand.

Remove about half the flour/butter and put in a bowl in the fridge.* Add half the cream cheese to the chopper and pulse until it resembles coarse cornmeal. Add half the water and half the vinegar and pulse until just combined. Put this half of the dough in the fridge and repeat with the other half.

Once the dough is made, flatten both pieces, stack them and fold the stack over on itself. (This will layer the two pieces in case there are any inconsistencies.) Shape the dough into a disc, wrap and refrigerate until thoroughly chilled, at least an hour and up to a few days.

*Since I don’t have a full-sized food processor, the instructions are written for a small chopper. If you have a food processor, by all means, use it and do it all in one batch.

Proving once again that bacon really does make everything better

Eli — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 19:07:00 +0000

Sit down kids, it’s time for a story. A year ago two of my co-workers went to an apple orchard. On the way home, they stopped at a butcher and bought, among other things, cinnamon bacon. Now, they didn’t plan this, but once cinnamon bacon and apples were in the same car, it was only a matter of time before someone said “Bacon Apple Pie!” And so it came to pass.

A pie was attempted that very day. It was made with care, with love, and yes, with bacon. And yet somehow the pie was bad. In fact the words used to describe this pie were “tasted like bile.” Immediately upon hearing this story, I denounced the failed pie-maker and I swore that I could successfully make a bacon apple pie…one that would be not just good, but transcendent.

I made plans with another co-worker to make this holy grail of pies. But somewhere along the line, things got a bit off course. We decided to use pears instead of apples. Then we decided not to make a pie at all. Maybe it was nerves, maybe it was just a creative inspiration…it was a year ago, I honestly don’t remember the reasons. But suddenly our plans for bacon apple pie turned into a bacon pear clafouti and a pear upside down bacon cake. They were both quite good, especially the upside down cake, but neither could be considered a pie by any stretch of the imagination. Nevertheless, I congratulated myself on a job well done and forgot about the whole thing.

Until this year when I went to the orchard with my family. Suddenly I had an abundance of apples and no plans for them. And so, I embarked upon an epic quest to create the perfect bacon apple pie.

That quest, unfortunately, has not yet been completed. I have, however, created a very good bacon apple pie. It’s sweet, salty, a little meaty, just a bit smoky with a hint of spices. The thing is, it doesn’t quite feel like a cohesive whole. It’s more like a good apple pie with some bacon. The flavors complement each other well, but they haven’t quite merged into that transcendent whole-is-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts experience that i just know this pie could (and eventually will) be. That said, this pie as is tastes pretty great; I have no qualms about posting this recipe. But that doesn’t mean I won’t continue to tweak it in search of perfection.

Lattice-Top Bacon Apple Pie

The bacon lattice really doesn’t want to stay tucked in around the edges of the pie. Be sure to include extra bacon sticking off the edge of the pie and tuck it down the inside of the crust to help mitigate this. Also, having a larger rim of pie dough to extend a bit further toward the center of the pie would probably help.
The quality of the bacon here matters. You want a bacon with a good amount of fat for the lattice top, since that’s replacing the butter usually included in apple pie filling. You also want a bacon with a good flavor when fried and eaten alone, because that’s almost what you have on top the pie.
I should also admit that I used store-bought pie crust. Honestly, I think the stuff you buy in rolls in the fridge case is almost as good as home made and a hell of a lot easier.

1 9″ pie crust
3 strips bacon, chopped and fried crispy
6-7 medium to large tart apples, peeled, cored and sliced (I used a combination of Cortlands and Ida Reds)
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp cloves
2 Tbsp plus 1 tsp cornstarch
1 Tbsp Scotch (I used Johnny Black. You want something noticeably smoky.)
1/2 cup real maple syrup
6-7 slices bacon, halved lengthwise

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Spread the pie crust in a 9″ pie pan and leave the overhanging edges. Sprinkle the bacon crumbles over the crust.

Mix together the apple slices, brown sugar, nutmeg, cloves, cornstarch and scotch. Spread over the bacon in the pie crust. Pour the maple syrup evenly over the apples.

Arrange the strips of bacon over the top of the pie crust in a lattice, then fold the edges of the pie crust over the bacon and crimp.

Bake for about an hour, until the bacon on top is nicely crisp, the crust is browned and a knife pushes easily into an apple slice. (Happily, these should all happen at roughly the same time.)

Footnote: Before I made my pie, I did a few quick searches to see who else had already made bacon apple pies in blogland. The answer, shockingly, was almost no one. (Although I did steal the bacon lattice top idea from one of them.) Even with the full saturation of bacon into the blogosphere, it seems bacon apple pie is nearly untouched.