I’ve been making pies for a million years and well pie and today we are going to make a fresh blackberry pie. We are looking for eight ounces of butter and cut up this butter into little pieces and then get it back in the fridge. Now if it’s a real hot summer day throw this in the freezer instead of the fridge because you really want to work quickly and keep it cold, so I’m putting in the refrigerator. When you measure out flour for pastry you don’t want to sift it and you don’t pack it so you do the dip and sweep and that’s this.
So pinch a salt so we have our flour here and I’m going to put the butter in that’s cut up into this little pieces and then we quickly start cutting it. And if you feel the whole thing feels still very cold. Now we are going to mix the water in to the pastry. So you want to go a little at a time and you want to work very lightly and quickly. What I’m doing is going underneath and just letting it come together like on its own in a way. I’m not trying to smash anything down. I can already tell I have to get more water. It’s going to come together as a mass with little pieces coming off of it.
After that we’ll able to just stick it, it’ll stick to the mass. It’s still just a little teeny bit dry and you can tell as in turn to ball it together and it’s falling apart. So let’s look at this one little drop, what it does. That one drop really brought that together. So we are just going throw this in to the refrigerator and let that sit. We are blind baked across and essentially what I mean is pre-baking across that you will then put the filling in to it. So we are going to slightly sprinkle the surface of the table with flour. The dough is nice and cold and it feels supple and not too hard, not too cold to roll out. Here is the rolling out technique.
You start just gently rolling out, if you feel that is sticking to the bottom board you take a little flour on there on the top, flip it over and then cover out with little flour and continue. Now as it starts getting a little bigger and you can’t just flip it over you can cover it with a little flour and you can take it on your pin and flip it over like that. The goal here is to get this crust uniform and about an eighth of an inch, roll it on to the pan very gently, pick it up like this and then roll it on to the plate.
Now when you put this on the pie plate, roll it on there but you don’t ever want to push. You want to let things fall into place. So I’m lifting it up here and I’m letting it sort of rest in there. Take our very handy tool, the till scraper. We are going to cut off the extra dough. We are going to make an edge and we want enough to roll but we don’t want to have too much and now we will start to roll up to make a crimp. If you feel like what I feel here, there’s a little bit too much dough you can pull that off there like that. I’m going to go back around and crimp this with a fork because I think it’s going to look nice with this pie. I’m going to throw this into the freezer now and we’ll let this rest again before we blind bake.
So it’s been about 45 minutes. This pie crust is cold all the way through and now we are going to do what’s called docking which is poking holes with the fork or something else which makes it so that the air bubbles don’t form, don’t push up too much. It gives a place for some air to escape. In blind baking this crust we are going to use beans as pie weights.
You can buy commercial pie weights but we are using beans because they are cheap and we are going to pour beans in to the crust with a parchment paper liner so that the beans will hold the pie crust down while it’s baking. Now we put the paper into the crust, fill up the pie crust with beans without pushing them down and you really want to get them out in there. So now we are going to in to the oven to blind bake this crust at 450 degrees. That’s going to stay in there for about seven to ten minutes until it starts getting bland and bubbly. We’ll look at it in a few minutes.
Let’s have a look at our blind baking crust. It’s really staring to firm up. What we are going to do is take these beans out now. You can scoop out a little bit with your measuring cup. Don’t scrape the bottom because you don’t want to do damage to your crust. You can just pick it all up gently and you can use those for the next five years. Now this crust is a little bit firm up here but we’re going to put it back in the oven. Now I’m going to turn the oven down to 350 and put it back in the oven so that it’ll be cook all the way. Baking pastry is not necessarily about time.
This is going to be in for another ten minutes probably but the answer really is you cook it until it is done and we are going to keep an eye on it because now that we have taken the weights off we have to be careful to watch the process as it’s baking in this state because we want to make sure to push down in the air bubbles that start forming. So let’s have a look at this and it can really smell that it’s done. Each of this is about a cup of blackberries. We are going to take one of the cups and put it into a sauce pan and the object of this is to make a sort of a jelly or a binding blackberry liquid to hold the rest of these fresh blackberries together in a suspended blackberry heavenly jam.
So we are going to put in a little lemon zest, a little squeeze the lemon juice. So we are going to put in a half a cup of sugar. Now we’re going to put this on the stove cup and just get that cooking, putting half a cup of water in and starting to boil later. When they start cooking like that I don’t want that water to cook out too much. So I want to help the blackberries break down. There are three tablespoons of cornstarch. We just have a couple tablespoon of water in with that, mix that up until a little slurry, a little at a time start stirring and you can see how milky that is so it’s not boiling at all put off right the stove.
So now we are going to take that out and let it cool down to room temperature, set that aside. Now we are going to make the filling. So we take the remainder of our berries, put them in to a mixing bowl. Now we take our room temperature thickened blackberry jam and pour it or scoop it onto the other berries and then gently, gently toss that around so that it coats the other berries. So we let this crust cool down for ten minutes so that it’s room temperature. Now we are just going to fill out this pie. Now the thing to think about when you’re filling your pie is not to smash anything or cover anything. You want to just pour it in there and let it fill itself in a way. Just gently push it out for about an hour. We are going to let this sit in the refrigerator. Oh my God, so good.
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