Blueberry Pie

Blueberry Pie
Originally uploaded by Pictures by Ann

Made a blueberry pie with a homemade crust using a recipe that my grandma passed down (she used to be a baker). The recipe for the blueberry pie itself is an Amish one.

The recipe was made for and shared as part of the 52 Weeks of Baking swap on Swap-Bot. Here's the recipe for the pie crust and pie filling:

Pie Crust Ingredients

1 cup lard
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
½ cup very cold water

Pie Ingredients

1 ½ cups granulated sugar
¼ cup light brown sugar, packed
¼ teaspoon grated nutmeg
¼ teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons quick-cooking tapioca
2 cups fresh or unthawed frozen rhubarb, cut into ½ inch pieces
2 cups fresh or unthawed frozen blueberries
1 tablespoon butter, cut into small pieces (I used dairy-free butter)

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. In a large mixing bowl, combine the sugars, nutmeg, salt, tapioca, rhubarb, and blueberries; mix well. Allow to stand for 10 minutes.

Make pie crust by combining all the ingredients except water. Mix well. Gradually add a little bit of water at a time until the ingredients form a ball of dough.

Roll out half the pastry on a floured surface and line a 9-inch pan, patting it in firmly. Pour in the filling and dot with the butter. Roll out a top crust, place on top of the filling, and seal the edges; slash to top to allow steam to escape.

Bake for 10 minutes, then lower the temperature to 400 degrees. Bake for 30 minutes more or until the crust is brown and the juices are bubbling up in the pie. Remove from the oven, transfer to a wire rack, and allow to cool completely before serving.

Note: If using fresh fruit, increase the baking time until juice appear on top of the pie, 10-15 minutes more. Tent with foil if the crust begins to get too brown.

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Sophia and I loved the taste of the blueberries, the sweetness of the sauce, and the pie crust. Olivia doesn’t like blueberries, but she likes pie crust, so she ate that.

I was disappointed that the sauce turned out so runny and the tapioca was still hard and not soft. Not sure why it does that. Perhaps I need to try another tapioca (a much quicker cooking one than the one that I used). I looked up my mom’s blueberry pie recipe and she did use tapioca also for a thickener. The tapioca she had was in a red box and it cooked in only 20 minutes. I’m wondering if the type I bought (not in a red box) was a longer-cooking version so it didn’t have time to properly dissolve and thicken the sauce.

The other thing that I didn’t use in this recipe was rhubarb. I was actually excited to use rhubarb and thought I had a lot frozen in the freezer from last year’s crop. I guess I must have used it during the winter. So, the blueberry rhubarb pie ended up just being a blueberry pie.

I’m going to try this recipe again in about a two months (July) when the rhubarb and blueberries are ready and fresh from the garden.

The pie crust is a very old recipe – probably from the first few decades of the 1900s. My grandma was a baker in downtown Minneapolis. She made a variety of baked goods, and the pie crust is something that there is no comparison to these days.

I make a double batch of the pie crust and freeze it into balls that are big enough to make 2 crusts. Wrap them in double plastic wrap. They freeze very well. Thaw and roll out when you’re ready to use them.