Thus Bakes Zarathustra

The best thing about making cherry pie is you get to make countless dirty references to cherry pie. And strippers. Thank you, Warrant.

Here’s the thing: I want to make more pies, but decent, metal pie plates are, for some reason, hard to come by in Melbourne. My basin of a pie dish really is too big, and baking things in glass or ceramic strikes me as civilized. So when I stumbled upon my ideal 9″ pie plate on a jaunt to Frankston Savers I knew I had to make a pie near-immediately. And who doesn’t like cherries? Here is my cherry pie. I’m looking forward to making it again soon.

Cherry Pie
Adapted from Amy Sedaris and Gourmet. 

Crust recipe (via Gourmet):

• 5 cups flour
• 3 tbsp sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp salt
• 450g butter
• 1 cup water, more as needed
• 2 tbsp lemon juice

Combine flour, sugar and salt and put them in a large zip-loc bag, or bowl, depending on how much room your freezer has. Cut your butter into pieces and put them in the zip-loc, along with the flour, giving it a shake to coat the butter in flour.  Combine water and lemon juice in a jug and put that in the fridge. Give it all 10-15 minutes to cool down.
Transfer butter and flour to food processor, and give it a few 3-4 second pulses until the butter is slightly cut into the flour. You’ll be pulsing again when you add the water, so aim for small bits with a few thumb-sized pieces here and there. Underprocessed is far superior to overprocessed. Add water a 3rd cup at a time, pulsing after each addition. Stop when the mixture looks shaggy but will easily form a clump when pressed in the palm of your hand.

Dump the mixture out onto a lightly floured work surface. It will look like a mess. You should see big, alarming bits of butter. You want this. Gather into a pile and press down with your hands until all the butter is squashed. Fold the dough-mass over on itself, press to combine. Repeat until it holds together, it really won’t take long. Divide into four parts, and mash each into a rough disc with your hands. Glad wrap all the discs. Toss two into the freezer, put the others in the fridge. Give the fridged discs at least an hour to relax before you roll them out. You could always halve this recipe to make enough crust for one pie, but just imagine the satisfaction of making your second pie with your pre-made dough. It’s pretty satisfying, I can tell you.

Filling recipe:

• 1kg cherries, more or less
• 3/4 cup sugar, brown or white
• 3 tbsp cornflour or arrowroot
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1/4 tsp cinnamon

Wash, stem and pit the cherries. Mix together cherries with everything else in a large bowl and allow to sit for 15 minutes. In the meantime, roll out one of the pie crust discs, using rice flour to dust your rolling surface. Rice flour is sandier than regular flour and will not toughen up your dough as much. Seriously, use rice flour. Anyway, ease your rolled out disc of dough into your pie plate of choice, press it into the corners and trim the excess. You’ll want around three centimetres of overhang over the rim of the plate to fold back over. A pair of kitchen scissors is ideal for this. I need to buy my kitchen its own scissors.

Anyway. Tip the cherries into the pie plate. Roll out the other disc of dough and cut into roughly 1.5cm strips. I used a steak knife freehand. My strips looked like this.

In future I will definitely use at least a ruler, which means I’ll need to buy a special kitchen ruler.

Here is how you make lattice. First step, drape a quantity of evenly spaced strips going in one direction across your pie. Then, fold back alternative strips to the halfway point, like this.

Then, lay a strip next to the folded back strips, and fold the strips back in place. Then, fold the other strips back over the perpendicular strip so you can place your next strip, like this.

Keep going until your lattice is latticed, like this.

Here is where I went wrong with my lattice: my crimping and pressing wasn’t firm enough, so in the baking process the edges kind of unfurled. In future, here is what I will do: when my lattice strips are cut and the edges of my bottom dough trimmed, I will brush the edge of the dough with water. Then, when all the lattice strips are laid down and trimmed neatly, I will mash each strip into the bottom dough mercilessly. Mercilessly! I shall crush them betwixt thumb and forefinger like they were the bodies of my enemies, and I shall drive them before me and hear the lamentations of their women! Then I will brush once more with water, fold the bottom dough over the lattice strips and crush again! Then I will do the pretty crimp-with-thumb-and-forefinger thing. Then an egg wash. To make an egg wash, beat an egg with a little water, then brush it over your crust.

Set the pie on a baking sheet and bake at 180 degrees C until browned and bubbling, around 25-30 minutes.  Allow to cool a little before serving. Eat while wearing cut-offs, then crawl around a little on the hood of a Camaro.