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Hello!

Thank you for the amazing 8 years here at A Baked Creation, we can't thank you enough for the memories! But we've decided to move over to a new site - Sincerely, Syl. Please join us there for future posts on all the things you loved here!

Sincerely,
Syl

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Blueberry Pie

We had ordered some products (we got mini pans and a zester) from CSN Stores for review. I want to say that their website is easy to use and ordering was quite simple. They ship pretty fast and keep you updated on each item's transit!

To test our new products, I had thought it would be fun for Howard to make some pies:





Wow. The perfect pie dough is hard to make! Howard and I were pretty sad about the way ours turned out, I think we may need to learn the techniques and practice more. With that being said, this is no reflection of the recipe we tried, we're pretty sure we messed up because the dough didn't turn out as flaky as it should. We will keep practicing in order to add pies to our repertoire!

Pie Dough
Adopted from The Grand Central Baking Book
(Makes one 10- to 12-ounce disk)

1 1/4 cup of all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon of granulated sugar
1 teaspoon of salt
1 stick of cold unsalted butter
3 tablespoons of cold water
Omitted 1 1/2 teaspoon of lemon juice (maybe this is where we went wrong?)
  1. Measure out your flour, sugar, and salt in a bowl. Let is refrigerate for at least two hours or overnight.
  2. Dice the cold butter into 1/2 inch cubes and toss them with the flour mixture.

  3. Add in your cold water. (But don't. This is where you're suppose to add the cold water to the lemon juice, so do that instead.)
  4. We mixed our dough by hand, move quickly so that your hands don't warm up the butter. Use your fingertips and thumbs to rub the butter together with the dry ingredients. The butter should be cold enough that you're coating the butter cubes with the flour.
  5. Stop mixing when the texture of the flour changes from silky to measly.
  6. You can hydrate your dough with the cold water and lemon juice mixture, one tablespoon at a time.
  7. Check your dough, if it holds together, it's ready. If it's dry and crumbly, mix a little longer before adding more water.
  8. When the dough has the proper amount of water, it will come together with minimal effort and no deliberate packing.
  9. Wrap the dough tightly and chill it (don't roll it out, it isn't ready to be used yet) for at least 1 to 2 hours or overnight (we left it overnight).


Blueberry Filling
Adopted from The Grand Central Baking Book
(Makes about 3 to 4 servings)

2 cups of blueberries
1/2 cup of sugar
2 tablespoons of lemon zest
2 tablespoons of cornstarch
1 tablespoon of lemon juice
  1. Preheat the oven to 190°C (375°F).
  2. Begin by zesting your lemon and squeezing out the lemon juice.

    The Microplane zester was easy to use and easy to clean. Look at how quick Howard is zesting!

  3. Toss the blueberries with the sugar and lemon zest.

  4. Combine the cornstarch and lemon juice, stir it a little.
  5. Roll out your pie dough, work quickly so that the dough doesn't soften. If it becomes too soft or sticky, cover it and refrigerate until firm.
  6. Place your rolled out pie dough in your pan and trim off the excess sides.

  7. Pour your blueberry filling in.

  8. Bake for 20 minutes until the crust is a rich golden brown and the filling is bubbling. Funny note: our crust remained quite pale and did not reach a golden brown colour. =(

The blueberry filling was really good, so we just have to work on creating flaky, buttery pie crust. The pans we tested out are non-stick and do just as they say. The pies popped out of the pan with ease and were easy to clean (since nothing stuck to it).

6 comments:

  1. You can brush down the crust with an egg white & a pastry brush, make sure you coat it evenly, and that will help the crust brown.

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  2. You can brush down the crust with an egg white & a pastry brush, make sure you coat it evenly, and that will help the crust brown. But this only really works if you have a double crust. I'm not sure what happened with yours :( I hope it was enjoyable at least!

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  3. this looks lovely sylvia!! blueberries abound...

    i am sure it was delicious despite the crust not being as brown as you'd have liked!

    i barely touch my crust when i make it. i almost pretend that ghost fingers are making it. i just say "don't even touch it, don't even touch it"! when my crust comes together there are still huge pieces of butter in there! but i chill it then roll it out that way anyway. i'm so scared to touch it because i don't want to ruin it -- my hands-off method has proven to create a flaky crust! :)

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  4. That pie looks delicious. Looks to me like you overworked the dough. I echo the previous commenter, I keep my hands off as much as possible. Gives the tenderest crust!

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  5. Ryan @ Ryan's Baking Blog, I knew it! Howard didn't believe that egg white would help. He wanted to follow the recipe strictly. We did try a double crust, but it looked so pale that I took it off!

    The Scootabaker, yum!

    lyndsay, thank you for your tip! I think we'll have to try making it with a food processor next time. I think we did knead it too much. Hands off from now on!

    Avanika [YumsiliciousBakes], thank you! I'm so happy that everyone is able to help us fix our mistakes. =)

    ReplyDelete