In honor of the Cooking Monster Pie Contest, here’s the recipe for my favorite pie.
My brother swears by tapioca as a thickener for pie filling, but I use flour because I always have it fresh and handy. I also keep my Crisco in the refrigerator, because I only use it for pie dough, and it’s better to keep it cold for that.
Crust:
2 c flour (10 ounces by weight)
¼ t salt
¼ t sugar
zest of one lemon, chopped fine
1½ sticks of frozen butter, chopped into ½” cubes
1 T Crisco (solid vegetable shortening)
1/3rd cup ice water
Put the flour, sugar, lemon zest, and the salt in your food processor bowl, and pulse a couple times. Add the butter and the Crisco, and pulse 10 times. Add the water and pulse 10 times more. The dough should be crumbly but will stick together if you squeeze a small handful.
Put it all in a ziplock, and form into a round patty. Put in the fridge for at least half an hour, or longer if you can afford to. (You can use it right away if you must.)
Filling:
6 c. fresh or partially thawed frozen blackberries
2 tsp. lemon juice
1 to 1 1/2 c. sugar
1/2 c. all purpose flour
2 tbsp. butter
1 egg yolk
1/2 tsp. water
Preheat oven to 400°. Line your pie pan with half of the dough. In large bowl combine blackberries and lemon juice; toss. In another bowl, combine the sugar and flour; sprinkle over blackberries and toss until well coated. Spoon into pastry-lined pie plate. Dot with butter. Top with remaining pastry.
Mix the egg and water to make an egg wash, and brush over the dough, and sprinkle with a little extra sugar. Cut a few holes in the dough to vent. Put the whole thing on a lined tray, and bake for 1 hour. Remove it from the oven, and let set for at least 45 minutes.
Are you sure there isn’t some kind of binding agent for the filling? I used this recipe and got a great crust encasing blackberry soup.
Well, that’s what the 1/2 c of flour is supposed to do.
I have seen some recipes which recommend crushing half of the berries in a saucepan, heating it up, and adding cornstarch to the hot goo, but when I tried that, it turned out kind of gummy.
Did you let the thing completely cool? And did you use fresh or frozen blackberries. Although I wrote the recipe to use frozen, I think they may make a lot more liquid.
I used thawed frozen blackberries. Oh well, no big deal. I am on a pie kick right now, so I’ll just try a different recipe.
Well, I did a google search for other recipes on the web for blackberry pie. One lists 6 cups of fresh raspberries and a mere quarter cup of flour. I’ll retest this recipe using frozen berries, and I’ll post the results here. Thanks!
This comment is a follow up to the Blackberry Pie recipe and comments that were posted over a yr. ago in April and May of 2008′. The recipe was submitted in honor of the “Cooking Monster Pie Contest.” Well I tried the recipe using 1 cup of sugar,and fresh picked wild blackberries, and followed everything else to a “T”….NUN,NUM,NUM! It turned out PERFECTLY and set PERFECTLY using the flour as opposed to tapioca. It was the first blackberry pie,(first fruit pie other than apple), that I ever baked.My husband couldn’t get enough.I guess now that I’ve discovered wild blackberry bushes growing on my property, I will not have an excuse not to bake this pie every season.Bravo to the owner of this recipe, and want to add that I chose to try this recipe over many others that I “googled!” This is the “only” blackberry pie recipe that I will ever need!
Sincerely., Carrie Anne..:)
In continuance to my above comment, I forgot to mention that I used 4 cups of berries instead of 6 because that’s all there was ready to harvest from my bushes at the time, and that is why I cut the sugar down from 1 1/2 cups to only 1 cup…it was perfect..
Carrie Anne.. 🙂