Roasted Strawberry Pie for Pi Day!
If there’s one dessert I could really just eat the hell out of every single day, it’s pie. The buttery crust? The unlimited possibilities of fillings? I don’t care if it’s Chicken Pot or Blueberry. If it’s pie…I’m eating it.
In my professional opinion, there is definitely a hierarchy of dessert pies. At the bottom we have Pies That Require Weird Ingredients: like chocolate pies, pecan pies, etc…While I will thoroughly fuck up a pecan pie, the fact that it’s literally just corn syrup is disconcerting to me.
Next rank up is icebox pies. I know they’re a big hit, and yes, you may catch me double forking a lemon icebox pie someday, but I don’t love that they’re literally freezing cold. Pie is comfort, and comfort to me requires a degree of warmth. The acidity and frigidity of icebox pies can feel like assault to the tongue.
At the very top tier sits fruit pies. My god do I love a fruit pie. For starters, they’ve got at least some nutritional value. For seconders, they have a lovely and complex texture. For thirders, they tend to strike that beautiful balance of subtly tart and subtly sweet that the other pies lower on the totem pole so often miss.
My favorite fruit pie is a tie between apple and blueberry, but this past week, we cracked open Erin McDowell’s The Book on Pie and tried on her Roasted Strawberry Pie for size. I gotta say, strawberry is now in my top three list of favorite fruit pies.
This particular pie uses very few ingredients—strawberries, sugar, lemon, a basic pie crust—but the process of slow roasting brings out a whole new dimension of flavor I find to be so scrumptious. It’s not too sweet, making it a great any-time-of-day-pie, whether paired with coffee in the morning or after dinner as dessert.
Given there is a slow roasting element, this pie is kind of an all-afternoon endeavor (albeit there is very little active cooking time). You could roast the strawberries and prep the pie crust on different days and assemble your pie later. Regardless of how you go about it, this pie is going to be a new favorite in your home. Find the recipe below, and don’t forget to grab a copy of Erin’s incredible The Book on Pie, and let me know what you think!
The Play-by-Play
Get your strawberries in the oven and give them a slow roast for three hours.
While your strawberries roast, begin the pie dough.
Cool ingredients (ice water and chilled butter) give a flakier, more tender crust.
The pie dough requires multiple 30-minute chill sessions in the fridge between being rolled out, so plan to spend a couple of hours in the kitchen!
Parbake your pie crust, fill it with your strawberries, bake again and enjoy!
Roasted Strawberry Pie with Rough Puff Pastry from page 153 of Erin McDowell’s The Book on Pie
Workflow Note: I recommend getting the strawberries in the oven first thing, and while they roast do the pie crust—by the time your berries are done you’ll have finished your crust and can move right along.
for the filling
1500 grams (4 1/2 cups) fresh strawberries
149 grams (3/4 cup) granulated sugar
Grated zest of 1 lemon
1 vanilla bean, halved lengthwise with seeds scraped out and reserved
2 grams (1/2 teaspoon) fine sea salt
for the crust (this recipe gives you two 9” crusts, though you only need one for this pie!)
302 grams (2 1/2 cups) all-purpose flour
2 grams (1/2 teaspoon) fine sea salt
226 grams (8 ounces) cold unsalted butter, cut into 3/4-inch cubes
75 grams (1/3 cup) ice water, plus more as needed
Preheat the oven to 275° F with racks in the upper and lower thirds.
Hull the strawberries and cut them into large pieces – cut large strawberries into quarters, medium strawberries in half, and leave the small guys whole. Transfer to two ungreased baking sheets.
In a small bowl, rub the sugar, lemon zest, vanilla beans seeds and salt together with your fingers to disperse the flavorings. Sprinkle the sugar over the fruit, toss gently to combine, and arrange in a single layer.
Roast the strawberries until they are soft but still not falling apart, 3 to 4 hours. (Beau’s note: this is a good time to start work on your crust. See recipe below.) Rotate the pans and gently stir the strawberries halfway through roasting. Toward the end of roasting time, the juices will have turned into a syrup, but both the juices and the fruit should still be red, not darkened in color. Transfer the fruit and juices to a medium bowl and cool completely.
Raise the oven temperature to 375° F; place a Baking Steel or stone on the bottom rack if you have one.
Spoon the roasted strawberries into the cooled pie crust (steps to make pie crust below) and transfer the pie to the oven. Bake until the crust is deeply golden brown and the strawberry filling has darkened slightly, 22 to 25 minutes. Let the pie cool completely before slicing and serving.
Make the pie crust. In a medium bowl, stir the flour and salt together to combine. Add the cubes of butter, tossing them through the flour until each individual piece is well coated. Cut the butter into the flour by pressing the pieces between your fingers, flattening them into big shards. As you work, continue to toss the butter through the flour, recoating the shingled pieces. The goal is to flatten each piece of butter only once, leaving the pieces very large (they will get smaller/more dispersed through the process of folding the dough).
Make a well in the center of the flour mixture. Add the ice water to the well and, using your hands, toss the flour and water to start to mix the two together (this begins to combine them without creating too much gluten). As the flour begins to hydrate, you can switch to more of a kneading motion – but don’t overdo it, or the dough will be tough. Then add more water, about 1 tablespoon/15 grams at a time, until the dough is properly hydrated. It should be uniformly combined and hold together easily, but it shouldn’t look totally smooth. Divide the dough in half and form each piece into a disk. Wrap tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.
On a lightly floured surface, working with one piece of dough at a time, roll out the dough to about ½ inch/1 cm thick (the exact size/shape of the dough doesn’t matter here, just the thickness). Brush off any excess flour with a dry pastry brush, then fold the dough in half. Fold the dough in half again into quarters. Wrap the dough tightly in plastic wrap and chill for 15 to 30 minutes, until firm.
Repeat step 3 three more times: rolling out the dough, folding it, and chilling it each time before continuing. If you work quickly, you can sometimes do two rounds of folds back to back, but if the dough is soft or sticky, don’t rush it.
Once the final fold is completed for each piece of dough, tuck the edges of the dough under to help form it into a rounded shape, then wrap again and chill at least 30 minutes before using. During the final chill, preheat your oven to 400° F.
Roll your dough out into a 1/8” thick circle large enough to fit your pie dish. Transfer to your dish and trim excess. Use a fork to prick the dough, place parchment on top and add pie weights (you can also use dried beans or uncooked rice for this. Par-bake for 15 minutes and let cool before using.
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