Pie #14: Arrival Pie (Pear Pie)

I have an insatiable desire to become an expert.  I don't want to make pies that are mediocre; I want to make perfect pies - every time.  Likewise in my research life I want to learn everything about the design criterion I created (and if I'm honest I want to learn everything about all the other criteria that are remotely connected to my criterion too)!  I love the learning process that it takes to become an expert - the research put in, the progress made, and the end result.  I don't particularly love the part of the process where learning exhibits as failures, yet this is also part of the process.

In the past 3.5 months of pie baking I have had several instances where I've thought to myself, "Erin Rae, I think you've arrived - you have mastered the art of pie baking."  Typically those thoughts are quickly followed by a crust that won't roll out, a pot of butter that turns to powder, an oven bottom covered in burnt filling, or some similar tragedy.  Sadly this also happens in my research life - I get to a point where I realize how much ground I've covered in the past year, and then my code breaks or another theoretical problem rears its ugly head.

Secretly I think the process is what keeps me coming back for more.  What is the fun in arriving - once an expert, what remains?

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Pear Pie

Ingredients:
1 unbaked pie shell

sliced fresh pears
1 cup sugar
4 heaping Tablespoons sour cream

1 teaspoon lemon juice (or a little more)

1/3 cup flour

lemon peel

cinnamon

nutmeg

Pie Algorithm:

1. Slice fresh pears into shell. 

2. Mix flour, sugar, lemon juice, and sour cream.  Pour over pears. 

3. Sprinkle with lemon peel, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

4. Bake 60 minutes at 375F.  Smack your lips and eat.

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My family made many pear pies with this recipe when I was growing up.  The pie is very easy to make and takes very little preparation time.  It is one of my absolute favorites.

Pie #13: Peace Pie (Salty Caramel Apple Pie)

Several weeks ago my friend Savannah made salty caramel birthday brownies for me.  They were very good and have been on my mind ever since.  Of course I've been searching for a way to incorporate salty caramel into a pie.  I toyed with the idea adding it to chocolate, pecan, apple, or a caramel-based pie (among several others).  Then it hit me - I would make a salty caramel pear pie!  I loved the idea of salty and caramel mixing with the delicately sweet pear, and looked forward to it all week.

Adding a little bit of pressure to the week was the fact that this pie was going to be shared at Peace, Pies, & Prophets, a comedy fundraiser for Christian Peacemaker Teams featuring the comedy performance of Ted and Co. and opened by the musical performance of Sour Cherry Pie.  (Yes, that's a shameless plug for my husband's band - more to come on that in a future week.)  At this event there will be pies up for auction as well as pies to be consumed on site.  Knowing people are hoping for tasty pies, I decided a practice pie was a necessity!

 

This week turned out to be a week of changing plans.  I purchased some not-quite-ripe pears towards the middle of the week only to find that they still weren't ripe at the end of the week.  Going with a backup plan, we now have salty caramel apple pie.  I also debated whether I wanted to create my own recipe or follow one that I found online on the Cooking Channel's website.  It looked delicious and I figured it would probably turn out better than the pie in my head, so I decided to go with it.  However, I simply couldn't make their caramel turn out right.  Therefore, the actual pie will have a variant of my family's caramel recipe (that I've been successful in making previously).  Grabbing some ideas from the recipe online and some from Aunt Lu's caramel recipe we have this week's pie.

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Salty Caramel Apple Pie

Ingredients:
2 pie crusts

1/2 cup sugar (white)
1/2 cup Karo
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/2 stick butter
splash vanilla
1 1/2 teaspoon sea salt (ground coarsely)

2 lemons
5-6 medium to large apples

1/3 cup raw sugar
2 Tablespoons flour
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon allspice
1/8 teaspoon grated nutmeg

milk
raw sugar
sea salt (ground coarsely)

Pie Algorithm:

1. Apple Seasoning: Mix sugar, flour, and spices in small bowl.  Set aside.

2. Juice lemons into a medium bowl and add some water (about 1.5 cups). Set aside.

3. Caramel: Combine sugar, karo, half of cream, and butter.  Bring to a boil and add other half of cream slowly.  Cook slowly to 230F*.  Remove from heat and mix in vanilla and sea salt.  Let sit while preparing apples.

4. Apples: WORKING QUICKLY (but not so quickly that you slice your finger), core, peel, and thinly slice apples - a mandolin slicer works quite well!  Put slices in lemon-water bowl, making sure they have been coated with the lemon juice.  Drain the apples well, and mix the spices into the apples by hand.

5. Place 1/3 of the apples then 1/3 of the caramel in the shell.  Make sure to stir caramel each time so all the salt doesn't settle to the bottom of the pan.  Also apples should be stacked in a way that minimizes open space.  Continue to layer 1/3 apples and 1/3 caramel two more times.  (Save a bit of caramel for the top crust!)

6. Lattice the top crust on the final layer of caramel.  Brush with a bit of milk, sprinkle with some sugar and salt.  Drizzle remaining caramel over the entire pie.

7. Bake at 375F for 20 minutes, then turn the heat down to 325F and bake for 25-35 minutes more.  (Cook until apples are just soft.)  Filling may bubble over - a pan under the pie helps alleviate an oven covered in burnt caramel!

*When making caramels as candy, you want to bring your liquid to 240F (soft ball stage).  However, because this batch of caramel was going to bake for a while longer I decided to heat the caramel only to 230F in the hopes of preventing another surprise - salty toffee apple pie!

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 The pie pictured at left is the mini-tester pie.  Overall it had a good flavor, but the caramel was too buttery for my taste.  As mentioned earlier I had trouble making the caramel turn out - the first batch turned to powder and the second batch was on its way to powder so I quickly threw in the cream.  Thus it never had the chance to brown and appears visually absent on the pie.  The flavor was there though and while I'm not a huge apple pie lover, the mixture of salty caramel and apple was definitely a plus!  Note the very thin strata of apples!

Pie update:  After waking at 6AM to make my second attempt (pie at right), I was really hoping this pie (the caramel specifically) would turn out better.  I am very hopeful!  While I haven't yet tasted this version, it appears to have turned out just as I had hoped!  We'll see if the crowd likes it!

Pie #12: Belated Birthday Pie (Ground Cherry Pie)

One year ago I celebrated my birthday with a room of academics who study computer experiments.  We were participating in a conference at Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical  Sciences in Cambridge, UK.  The traditional conference dinner occurred on the evening of my birthday, and (unbeknownst to me) my advisor was informed that it was my special day.  Since he was one of the organizers of the conference, he stood up to make the typical conference organizer 'Thanks for your participation in this conference' speech and at the end asked if anyone having a birthday would make themselves known.  I was the only one - at least the only one who came forward.  Luckily I was quick on my feet and was able to divert my embarrassment with a laugh by thanking everyone for attending my party.

This story yields the perfect set-up for a probability problem:  Say there are 100 computer experimenters in a room; what is the probability that any two of them will share the same birthday?  The short answer (with a few distributional generalizations) is 0.9999997.  If you'd like to see the math at work, see Wikipedia or feel free to set up an office hour with me.  Note that the question above is a very different question than asking 'What is the probability that someone else at the banquet (one of the other 99 people) has the same birthday as myself?'  This answer is a less surprising 0.2378.

Now that our probability lesson is over, let's talk pie.  The conference banquet ended with a dessert decorated with two little small fruits.  Everyone around me made guesses as to what they were: mini tomatoes, tomatilloes, etc.  I knew instantly what they were - ground cherries!  No one sitting near me had heard of a ground cherry before yet there the little fruits lay.  They were still connected to their shell which was peeled back one panel at a time - much fancier than the ground cherries I'd previously encountered.

 

My first memories of ground cherries are connected to my great-grandma Lantz (aka Granny).  I loved to visit her on the farm.  We would drink water from her well using the tin cup that hung outside her shop, gather eggs from the chickens, pick golden raspberries out by the truck-patch, and play with her very shaggy and very matted dog Queenie.  It is Granny's recipe that I used to make my belated birthday pie. 

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Ground Cherry Pie

Ingredients:
1 pie crust (9-inch)

ground cherries
1 c. sugar
3-4 eggs
1 T. flour
1 c. milk

Pie Algorithm:
1. Stir sugar, eggs, and flour.  Add milk.

2. Put ground cherries in unbaked pie shell (1 layer deep) and pour mixture over top.

3. Bake at 400F for 10 minutes then reduce to 350F for 40 more minutes.

*Note: My family often makes this as a raspberry pie instead.  Other berries would probably be just as delightful!

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I want to extend a special thanks to my parents who allowed me to use their ground cherries - which have been growing like the weed that they are.  Also, thanks to Wanda for the lovely pie pictures from Pie #11 and Pie #12!

Pie #11: Great Pie (Grape Pie)

I grew up in a town of roughly 4,000 people.  My family lived right in town - we were located near school, the park, a grocery store, and most everywhere else we wanted to go.  However, unlike most of the other houses in town, we had a huge garden and many fruit trees/bushes.  Summers meant harvesting the fruits and vegetables, snipping/shucking/preparing them, and then canning/freezing them.  While my siblings and I helped, there were many early and late hours Mom and Dad spent on this process which we did not see.

Growing up with an abundant garden taught us children many valuable lessons.  We learned that home-grown produce always tastes better than store-boughten produce.  We learned that sticking a kidney bean in your ear is a bad idea and is worrisome to Wanda (Mom).  We learned the value of a dollar, to make change, and how to manage profits when we sold the excess produce at a small stand in front of our house.  We learned to tend a garden: how to plant various vegetables, to differentiate between weeds and what we had planted, and not to plant 90 tomato plants in one season no matter how much canning you plan to do!  Most importantly we learned how good home-preserved veggies taste in the middle of winter.

One of my favorite mid-winter treats was popcorn and home-canned grape juice.  While visiting NW Ohio several months ago I found that same sweet taste in the pie that was waiting for our arrival on Kathy's table.  I was baffled.  I had heard of grape pie before, but had never tried it for fear of a terrible texture.  (I only ate it this time because I assumed it was a summer berry pie!)  Upon questioning, I found that this pie was made with a frozen bunch of last year's grapes!  Not only can I have homemade grape juice mid-winter...I can also have grape pie!

Now that Mom and Dad's grapes are beginning to ripen and they were gracious enough to share their crop, I decided to try my hand at making this pie.  A special thanks to Wanda for helping to slip grapes, rolling out the crust, and taking the pictures shown here!  The recipe below contains all the steps to make the pie.  However, if you'd like to preserve some grape pie mixture for winter, you can freeze the grapes after Step 1 below and then thaw the grapes and complete the remaining steps when you're ready to make the pie.

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Grape Pie
Sharon Sauder, West Clinton Mennonite Church Cookbook

Ingredients:
2 pie shells, unbaked

4 c. concord grapes (2 pounds)
1 c. sugar
pinch salt
1/4 c. flour
1 T. lemon juice
2 T. melted butter

Pie Algorithm:
1. Slip skins from grapes and reserve.  Put pulp in a saucepan and cook over medium heat for 5 minutes.  Press the pulp through a sieve to remove seeds.

2. Mix pulp with sugar, skins, salt, flour, lemon juice, and butter.  Pour into pie crust and top with second crust.

3. Bake at 400F for 10 minutes and then 350F for 30 minutes more.

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This week's pie name is a tribute to Marvin (my maternal grandfather).  For years he has pretended to be hard of hearing, and changes the letters in words.  For instance, he addressed Perry as Barry for several years - not because he didn't know better...rather because he DID know better.  Another pair of words he likes to exchange is great and grape; when asked how he's doing he has been known to respond,  "Grape!"  Thus I thought the pie name would be fitting, and made sure to take a 'Great Pie' to Grandma and him.  An added bonus to delivering the pie was that I learned that my Great-Grandma Orpha often made grape pies.  I always knew her for her sugar cookies and ice cream treats...now I know a bit more!

While grape pie takes a little more time than some to make, it is a very tasty treat!  I love the flavor, and look forward to eating some as I watch snow fall outside my window this winter!