Summer Fruit + Parmigiano Pie
Here’s a complicated truth for you, my friends that I won’t sugar coat. Pie making isn’t simple or quick.
The crust should ideally always be done a day before. It needs rest time. It involves a double bake and before serving, the baked pie should rest a minimum of (please don’t yell at me) three hours. I can also confidently say that it’s one of my absolute favourite activities in the kitchen. I earnestly find few things as relaxing, fun or romantic. (I said what I said).
I advice you to read the whole recipe before you start, as there are some details you’ll want to be prepared for, but other than that, remember that even if you make a couple mistakes (as I certainly have), you’re still combining water, sugar, flour and butter. And that, my friends, is one of the few guarantees out there that things will, in the end, turn out just fine.
ingredients:
Crust (makes 2 crusts):
5 cups - 700g AP flour
4 sticks unsalted butter
1 cup ice water (approx)
1 tbsp kosher salt
3 tbsps granulated sugar
Filling
5 peaches (sliced)
10 strawberries (sliced)
1 tbsp white destilled vinegar
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1/2 tbsp kosher salt
1/4 cups granulated sugar
3 tbsps corn starch
1 vainilla bean
20g parmigiano reggiano (crumbled)
instructions:
Fill a bowl or quart container with ice and add your cup of water. stick in the fridge to keep cool.
For the crust, In a large bowl, combine your flour, sugar and salt. Mix well and set aside in the fridge to keep cool.
Working quickly, Slice two of your butter sticks in half an inch thin squares. The other two sticks cut alongside the butter stick and then across, resulting in small cubes, approximately the size of a wallnut. (You don’t need to be precise here, variation in the size of the butter cubes will serve the crust well in the oven).
Check to see if your butter cubes are cold. If you feel them softening, stick them in the freezer for 5 to 8 minutes so that they’re cold and firm for the next step.
Take out your flour bowl from the fridge and add your butter cubes into the flour. Toss them with your hands, making sure each individual cube is covered in flour.
Begin pressing and pinching the cubes of butter, flattening them in between your thumb and the middle of your index finger. In this process, some butter cubes will naturally end up smaller than others, but try for all of them to be flat and not chunky. Work quickly so that your warm hands don’t melt the butter cubes. We want small, visible and individual pieces of butter to remain visibile throughout this process. You’ll know whan to stop when the flour doesn’t look so dry anymore, it begins resembling wet sand a bit, and if you grab a handful of flour with butter pieces and press it, it almost holds together.
Stick the bowl with the flour and butter in the fridge to fill, while you work on your filling.
In a large bowl, start adding your sliced fruit. You’ll want to slice your peaches in half moon shapes, discarding the pit, and the strawberries you can quarter or cut in half depending on the size. You want relatively big pieces of fruit here. Avoid chopping it too finely or small.
In that same bowl with your sliced fruit, add your sugar, salt, vinegar and cornstarch. Mix well.
Slice your vanilla bean length wise to expose the interiors. Using the dull side of a knife or a spoon, scrape from the top of the bean to the bottom, effectively removing all the interior beans. Scrape well and then add the interior of your vanilla bean to your fruit bowl. (You can keep your empty vanilla pod in a jar full of gin in the fridge. This makes for a nice vanilla concentrate for cocktails).
Mix the bowl well, making sure there aren’t any large clumps of vanilla in any given piece of fruit. You’ll see, when you’re done that every piece of fruit is covered with a tiny constelation of black vanilla spots. (The olive oil will help the fruit to fry in the heat and develop more flavour).
Take your ice water out of the fridge, and using a table spoon, you’ll begin drizzling ice water into the flour and butter, shaking the bowl thoroughly after each drizzle.
At first it’ll seem like not much is happening. This is normal! The flour takes time to hydrate and the water to properly distribute. This is why shaking the bowl constantly will ensure that the entire mixture is moving around and that the water is reaching all corners of the bowl gradually.
After 3 or 4 drizzles and shakes, start mixing everything with a spoon. The moment you see that the mixture is coming together in big, shaggy balls, transfer the contents of the bowl into a clean work surface and continue mixing there.
Using preferably a Bench Scraper (so that you don’t use your warm hands and thus soften the butter) continue tossing the mixture together, adding table spoon after table spoon of water.
After 3 or 4 tbsps you’ll notice the mixture starts resembling wet sand. Every so often, grab it tight with your hands and press it together. It will begin to hold, like sand castles.
As this begins to happen, start dividing your mixture in half, and stacking one half on top of the other, and then pressing everything down. You might have to continue adding a few more tbsps of ice water and mixing well. At first, you’ll feel like you’re just stacking dry flour together, but as you continue doing this motion, you’ll see the mixture begins coming together into a dough. Holding together and that pressing it down starts becoming a bit tougher. By doing this you are creating layers of butter and dough.
Once the entire dough comes together in one mass (even if not perfectly) and there are no more obvious patches of dry, loose flour, this is a good place to stop. As best you can, form your dough into a 1 inch thick rectangle. Cut the rectangle in half, effectively making two roughly equal cubes of dough. These are your two pie crusts. Cover them both in plastic wrap and refrdgerate for 2 hours minimum but ideally overnight. (One of them you can freeze and it will hold in the fridge for up to 3 months. just thaw overnight in the fridge the night before you want to roll it out).
When you’re ready to roll out your pie, preheat your oven to 420º.
Take your dough our of the fridge and uncover it. You’ll likely find the dough too hard and cold to roll out, so to flatten it out and get it start it, give it some whacks with your rolling pin. You’ll see this gets it to a thickness that is more managable and it’ll make it easier to roll out. When you see that it has spread out and it’s considerably larger in diameter, you can start sprinkling some extra flour and rolling it out, trying your best to make a circle out of it.
Getting the cirle shape can be challenging. To achieve this, every two or three rolls, rotate the dough in it’s own axis a bit (about 25º) This will ensure you roll it out evenly and that the dough doesn’t stick as you roll it.
Word of caution. If you’re doing this on a particularly hot day and you see your dough is warming up, stick it in the freezer for 5 minutes and then continue! You want to keep your butter pieces visible throughout the entire process.
Once you end up with a circle that is wide enough in diameter to fill your pie plate + it’s walls, slather your pie plate in more butter (to avoid sticking in the oven) and place your dough on the plate. (The best way to do this is to fold the dough in four into a square, lifting it, dropping it into the center of the dish and then unfolding, gently)
Try as best you can to avoid having gaps of air between the dough and the plate. Specially in the corners. Use gravity to make sure the dough is resting snuggly across the entire dish.
Score your dough with a fork to make even, tiny holes across the entire dough. These will act as vents and will give the steam inside the butter a place to escape, and will avoid the crust losing it’s shape while baking.
To blind bake your dough, cover it in tin foil and then on top of the tin foil, fill the dish with pie weights (I use dry beans, but you can also use rice or any grain you don’t plan to cook).
Stick the pie plate with weights in the oven and reduce the temperature to 365ºF. Bake for 45 minutes.
Remove the pie plate from the oven, and carefully lift the tin foil and set aside the weights. You’ll see that the bottom crust looks shiny, almost wet with grease from the butter. This is normal. Place back in the oven for another 45 minutes to an hour. This will ensure your crust fully cooks and bakes.
When your crust is looking golden brown, remove from the oven, and if it puffed a bit, gently press it down using a measuring cup or any other flat vessel.
Add your fruit filling to the crust and top the fruit with chunks of Parmigiano, distributing evenly. The idea is for there to be lots of size variation. The smaller bits of cheese will fully melt and the larger ones will stay whole, making each bite of the pie different and special.
Place back in the oven to bake for 90 minutes.
When you remove the pie from the oven, some of the top pieces of fruit should look a bit charred, and the Parmigiano should look golden brown.
Let the pie rest for a minimum of three hours to fully cool down. You can keep the pie to cool overnight and the next day, the juices will have solidified and the flavours will have concentrated.
Serve with more Parmigiano and some fresh mint on the side and a glass of Amaro or Prosecco.
