Two strawberry pies

Here they are- reviews of the first two strawberry pies we've sampled this year! If you have a strawberry pie recipe you think I should sample, please send it my way...

Fresh Strawberry Pie with Whipped Cream was featured in the June issue of Gourmet. It has a nice shortbread crumb crust, and uses gelatin to set the filling. I liked that the filling consisted of plain gelatin flavored with juice collected from the strawberries as they macerated in sugar- many recipes that use gelatin in the filling use strawberry Jell-O, which is artificially flavored. This pie also gets high scores for sliceability- it comes out of the pie plate in nice tidy triangles. Sorry- I forgot to take a picture before we dug in, but the recipe photo on the Epicurious website is pretty accurate. We liked the flavor of the pie just fine, and my toddler literally licked his plate until we took it away and tried- but failed- to offer a lesson in table manners. "More pie!" was his only response. As for me, I guess I'm not so keen on the texture of the gelatin. While the recipe introduction promises that the filling doesn't set to the point of being "bouncy" it was still too firm for me. I like a little bit of juiciness in the fillings of my fruit pies.

(Yes, I know that gelatin is not technically vegetarian. I'm experimenting a little with becoming slightly omnivorous again).

The second pie I tried is from the April 2000 issue of Cooking Light magazine, and is simply called Fresh Strawberry Pie. This one has a crumb crust made with crushed Nilla Wafers, flavored with orange zest. I was a bit nervous about baking the zest into the crust, thinking that it might get overbaked and bitter, but it was actually a really delicious crust, and I thought the citrus flavor complemented the sweet strawberry filling beautifully.

The filling for this one involves crushing 2 cups of berries, then cooking them on the stove with a bit of water, then sieving them and mixing the resulting juice with sugar and cornstarch to make a glaze. This worked just fine, but I didn't really like using up two cups of berries just to get the juice (you discard the berries), and wonder if the same effect could be achieved by either pureeing the berries, or macerating them with some of the sugar and collecting the juice, while using the berries themselves in the filling. The glaze is then poured over small whole berries that have been carefully arranged (or not, in my case) in the baked crumb crust. In my case, I had berries in varying sizes, so I diced the largest ones and placed them in the bottom of the crust, then tossed the whole berries on top.

The verdict- a really strawberry-y pie with great flavor. Little quibble: the glaze is a *tiny* bit on the sweet side, but overall it was delicious with a bit of whipped cream on top. We'd definitely make this one again.

I remembered to take a photo of this one, but not until after I cut the first slice!



Fresh Strawberry Pie with Whipped Cream (adapted from Gourmet)

Fresh Strawberry Pie (adapted from Cooking Light; pictured above)

Next up- a couple of pies that combine berries with a creamy filling.