Sure, a day late and a buck short but it’s impossible to have a slice of this and feel like anything less than a champ. ![]() Loser pie it may be but I don’t know when to quit, so I swept through the Greenmarket on my way home and came home with some last-gasp strawberries and rhubarb (the rhubarb season was especially short here this year) and went at it again with a little more tapioca and oh man, I think I’ve finally got it. I made my usual crust, tweaked the filling’s flavors a little, dialed back the sugar and enlisted those tapioca gems to drink, drink, drink… and still, the pie puddled on the judge’s plate. I consulted your comments on my recipe, I consulted Martha Stewart’s cookbooks and Cooks Illustrated too and declared instant tapioca pearls to be the answer. Nothing seems to get that baby to firm up to more than a (delicious) puddle, not swapping flour for cornstarch, cornstarch for more cornstarch and not even trying to “vacuum” a little overflow out of the pan while it bakes. It’s delicious, but is has always vexed me because it’s, well, sloshy. And I love a challenge so I took this as an opportunity to revisit my standard recipe. Strawberry-rhubarb pie? Not so much.īut oh man, I love strawberry-rhubarb pie, in spite of or perhaps because of its old-timey charm at their best, cooked strawberries taste like cotton candy and rhubarb is the perfect almost citrusy-sour contrast. Because as far as I’m concerned, cherry pie is at the top of the pie heap it’s epic, it’s iconic and it even has a metal song this kid likes to watch me head bang to dedicated to it. I was invited to participate in a “cooking smackdown” yesterday on The Takeaway, a morning radio show (produced by WNYC, The New York Times, BBC, WGBH and Public Radio International) in which a pie of my choice would go up against a cherry pie from New York Times columnist and collaborator on more cookbooks than I can count on two hands and all of my toes, Melissa Clark and my first reaction was: nope, no way. ![]() ![]() In the latter category there are the soggy bottoms, the overly-gelled fillings, the mortarboard crusts, the treacly sweet and those flawlessly latticed, magazine-ready specimen that turn out to have under their pretty lids. Do you have a favorite pie? I always think of pies falling in two categories, the prom queens, the blue ribbon prize winners, the ones that the president can’t keep out of his thoughts, and the rest of them.
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