Up in Western New York, where my mother's from, people grow purple raspberries. These are a cross between red raspberries and black raspberries (black raspberries themselves being a cross between red raspberries and blackberries). Purple raspberries make, quite simply, the best pie on earth. Indeed, if I had to pick one food to live on for the rest of my life, it would be purple raspberry pie. And I don't have much of a sweet tooth.
Sadly, purple raspberries don't travel well, so the only way to get them is to live quite close to a farm that's growing them. So I've been experimenting with ways to get something close to that flavor.
I haven't managed to quite crack it--but I have produced an exceptionally delicious pie using 2.5 cups of red raspberries to 1.5 cups of blackberries. Remember, kids, unless you're picking them up at a farm stand, always use frozen--unlike the berries in the supermarket, frozen berries were picked ripe and flash frozen immediately, which will give you superior results to all but the very freshest local produce. 7/8 of a cup of sugar, a few tablespoons of flour, a sprinkle of cinnamon, put it in a pie crust, and if you're feeling decadent, dot the top with butter or margarine. Summer eating just doesn't get much better than that.
Incidentally, almost any basic pie crust recipe can be veganized with Crisco, which doesn't quite have as much flavor as butter, but produces a much flakier, finer textured product. I never buy pie crust--if you really don't want to fuss with it, I vote for making an impromptu strudel out of frozen puff pastry sheets or phyllo, which are really quite decent. Sadly, the same cannot be said of store bought pie crust. If you're afraid to make one, the important thing to remember is this: your first pie crust is going to be awful. It will fail to hold together, be too thick or too thin, and almost certainly not resemble anything like the perfect circle so lovingly pictured in your cookbook. That's all right. It will still taste better than your store bought pie crust. And four or five crusts later, you'll have gotten the knack of it, and friends will be swooning over your homemade pies.
An even easier way to do berry tarts is to bake up some of those frozen Pepperidge Farm puff pastry shells. Boil down a bag of frozen mixed berries with about half a cup of sugar until it forms a moderately thick sauce. (This is not an exact science: pick the thickness you like, keeping in mind that it will thicken as it cools.) Then fill the shells with a layer of the sauce or some lemon curd, a layer of fresh berries, and another layer of sauce. Add whipped topping if you roll that way. Super easy and really, really lovely to eat.
Pie, on the other hand, travels quite well by FedEx, especially to towns in western Connecticut where a certain daily reader resides.
Total agreement on your oft-mentioned point about frozen berries. Another plus - they don't get moldy if you don't use them right away.
Also, if you're a complete bachelor-style cook, frozen berries in the microwave for a couple minutes results in a fair approximation of "Boil down a bag of frozen mixed berries with about half a cup of sugar until it forms a moderately thick sauce."
Crisco indeed results in flakier (and more reliably successful, I think) piecrusts. But beware of old Crisco containers. Yes, it can go off. Waaaaaayyyyyy off.
In NE Massachusetts where I spent some formative years, I discovered a few purple raspberries that grew wild. Since no-one else showed an interest in this delicious wonder, I ate every one myself. They disappeared after a year or two. I have never tasted one since.
However, there was then a flavour available in drug store ice cream called "Artificial Raspberry". It had a definite and not too distant echo of the purple flavour. It also disappeared, apparently unappreciated by the mass market.
It follows that, to my regret, I have never had purple rasberries available when making Summer Pudding; my favourite summer eating (best served with a little disgracefully thick cream). I have made do with your proportions (5 to 3 by volume) of red raspberries to blackberries. But where you use a touch of cinnamon to point up the flavour, I use a few red currents in the fruit mix.
My wife is one of the world's best pie-makers, her rhubarb is out of this world. And she makes a great crust, but the one thing that holds her back is that she won't use lard, which is the secret ingredient for the very bestest crusts.
coincidentally, I just made my first pie crust (with butter) last weekend. It actually turned out very well, though indeed the shape was off and I sort of fit it in the pan and cut off the extra. Nonetheless, tasted delicious.
Remember, kids, unless you're picking them up at a farm stand, always use frozen--unlike the berries in the supermarket, frozen berries were picked ripe and flash frozen immediately, which will give you superior results to all but the very freshest local produce.
This is also true of peas for the plate and (in cans) tomatoes for sauce. Many top chefs (i.e. Mario Batali) use Birds-Eye frozen peas and canned tomatoes.
Spectrum Oils makes a lovely shortening that I prefer to crisco; I get it at the local food coop.
Crisco was recently reformulated, and it's now mostly canola oil. I know, they say it's "better" for you. My digestive tract disagrees. I challenge the notion that canola oil is food, and suggest that instead, it's food-like. It's a refined, industrial oil.
Gene:
Lard is one of the three secrets to a great (and super-flaky) pie crust. The other two are a pastry cloth and a rolling-pin sleeve. And the fourth secret for apple pie in particular is Jonathan apples, if you can get them. They show up for a couple of weeks in the fall in Virginia and Maryland, maybe some other states.
Crisco is a decent second-best to lard, and Granny Smiths a decent second-best to Jonathans, but I would never make pie crust with butter. If you have a good apple pie recipe, try substituting pears or quinces for half the apples. Yummy.
By the way, for some years my mother had to go to black or Hispanic neighborhoods to buy lard for pie crusts, since grocery stores in white neighborhoods didn't carry it. However, in the last 10 or 15 it's been available just about everywhere. Whether that's because Mexican immigrants are now found in every neighborhood (at least during the work day), or whether there's a trend towards cooking with grandma's authentic recipes (like playing Bach on 'original instruments') countering the overall trend towards healthier foods, or a bit of each, is a good question.
Zic,
Where I grew up, you could see Canola fields as far as the curvature of the earth would let you. I assure you that Canola is as natural as corn oil. And the fields look pretty good too.
But Canola isn't the real name. That was thought up by marketers (CANada + Oil + Low Acid = Canola?). Canola comes from rapeseed, and I'm sure you can appreciate the difficult sell for rapeseed oil with cooking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canola
It's worth noting for all you recipe-tweakers out there that butter has only 80% the fat per measure of lard or Crisco; if you're substituting, you need to adjust for that.
Cherries just ripened here and I spent the w/e making pies for friend and family (we picked about 50 pounds this year). We will pick blueberries next. I agree that lard is best but not always available. Crisco is next, especially for flakiness. Butter gives a nice flavor and you can mix the two if you want for a nice compromise.
I think the real key to a good crust is to not do too much to it. Get it to hang together and throw it in the pan. Patch if need, it will cook together. Over working and overcutting in the fat makes it more of a dough and less of a crust.
Steve
I don't know whether this is close enough for you and I can't say if there aren't any closer to you, but the PYO place I go to have purple and black raspberries:
Larriland, located in southern Howard county, Maryland.
Lucky for you, the season approaches.
The Good Eats aficionado would suggest that you use a half-portion super dense fat like lard or Crisco cut in thoroughly, for texture, with a half-portion of butter cut in more coarsely afterwards, to produce a more flaky and flavorful crust.
You can make berries travel well by freezing them in a single layer on a baking sheet. We do this every season with blueberries and red raspberries with excellent results.
By the way, as someone writing this from Western New York, where do I go to get some?
Although I have enjoyed a few excellent home-made pie crusts, not one of them was good enough to convince me to dump Marie Callendar frozen crusts. Especially not since the Super Wal-Mart stores (i.e. the ones with grocery) started stocking the two-pack for about $2.50, which either makes two open-top pies, or one closed-top pie with enough trimmings for a tasty snack. I like me a good fruit pie, particularly apple or strawberry-rhubarb, but a properly-made filling is sufficient work that I don't want the added grievance of preparing a crust as well.
Mouse,
Have you ever gone to the WalMart for half- priced, double-pack semi-frozen 8-inch open-top/closed-top three-pack crusts, which are now on sale for six for four dollars, three for two?
BTW, Megan disaproves of store-bought anything, so start making your own GD crusts--that's an order.
huckleberry pie uber alles!
Cook's Illustrated recommends the use of vodka (in addition to water) for pie crust making because it allows you to roll the dough out easier without the side effects of too much water.
I made an effing awesome peach and raspberry crisp this weekend by sort of marrying recipes by Cook's Illustrated and Ina Garten. It was super quick and required no special skills or tools. Crisps and cobblers are underappreciated summer desserts IMHO.
Please, please stop writing.
Corby Kummer is the Atlantic's food writer.
You are not fit to clean the drippings from his tie.
How long do you bake the pie?