A Pie a Week - Bumble-berry pie

I was pretty discouraged about the crust I made for the peach pie on the fourth of July weekend. The peaches were great - but the crust, not so much. Too dry, too crumbly. But I thought I should give the recipe another try. After all, it was the one Ken Haedrich in his book "Pie: 300 Tried-and-True Recipes for Delicious Homemade Pie" says he uses most of all. Perhaps it was crumbly the last time because I overprocessed it in the Cuisinart. I decided to try again, and make it by hand.

I finally got out to the store and bought a pyrex pie-plate, and on the way back home stopped at a market where berries were on sale for a great price. So I leafed through the book and came up with his recipe for "Dundee Arms Inn Bumble Berry Pie." It's a mixed fruit pie in a traditional crust - except it has an interesting twist.

You make a batch of pie dough large enough for a double-crust pie. I started by hand, and already I knew that the dough would handle better than it had before with the bits of fat less pulverized. As the recipe said, I divided the dough into two discs, and put one in the refrigerator to chill for an hour, and the other in the freezer.

The dough rolled out was still fragile and a bit crumbly - although where it cracked apart it was easy enough to pull off a little bit from the edge and patch it, before rolling over it again. I lined my pyrex dish with the dough and put it in the freezer, too.

I had blueberries, raspberries and strawberries. The recipe also called for rhubarb, which I didn't have. It called for a total of four cups of berries, but I ended up putting in at least five cups of fruit - I had lots of strawberries and blue berries. I mixed the berries with a cup and a quarter of sugar, and a half cup of flour as the recipe said.

Then I put the fruit into the shell. Looks good, doesn't it?

Next came the interesting part. For a top crust, the recipe instructs you to take the frozen disc of pie dough set aside for the top crust, and, using a box grater, grate it onto the top of the pie as if grating a block of cheese!

Some of the dough flaked and broke off, since my dough was crumbly. But when I thought about it, I realized I'd rather be grating it than trying to roll it. When I was all done, the pie looked like this:

It's kind of like a streusel topping, actually, only a streusel topping includes flour, butter and brown sugar. I put it into the oven and baked it for an hour.

Here's what it looked like when it came out.

Was it good?


Oh, yes.


You bet. It was so good that Our Son ate three slices. With ice cream.