Some of the EPP* gals and I went apple picking on a farm South of the city. We picked Jonagold and Empire apples. I made applesauce and an apple pie with a whole wheat crust. We used my mother's canning supplies to preserve some peaches from the farm, which we made into peach butter and peach jam . It was a lovely weekend activity.
*Engineering and Public Policy
We had some really old bananas, and I picked up sour cherries at the farmers market. I spent the afternoon baking banana muffins and and sour cherry peach pie. Whith all of my recipes packed I looked up a pie crust recipe. The best one I found was a single layer recipe - so I doubled it. Only, when I doubled it I didn't pay close attention the the units of measurement for the butter. What should have been 1/2 cup of butter was read as 1/2 pound of butter resulting in a quadrupling of the butter! The crust was so mushy I had to use handfulls of flour to roll it out. As the pie was baking I saw the puddles of butter and realized my error. It was very delicious, though too rich for my blood.
I like pie. I love the way the sweet, soft inner fruit makes the crumbly crust moist but still crispy. Fresh sour cherry pie is what I grew up on and how I came to love pie. We don't have fresh sour cherries nearby - the season is over anyhow. We have a bakery nearby that makes delicious pie- but we're trying to save.
I decided to make peach pie. And just for fun I decided to compete against myself. I made one pie with fresh peaches and one pie with canned peaches. Now- I did not use the revoltingly sweet pre-prepared pie filling. I drained sliced peaches in light syrup.
To keep things fair I simply doubled everythign in the recipe and split it between the pies. It wasn't perfect- but good enough. An intersteding not is that the cost was almost identical for the two pies.
Both pies were good. The fresh peach pie was more excellent. It was less moist but the peaches had a lovely crisp texture. The canned peach pie lasted longer(in fact is still around), and was much more moist and mushy.
Amazingly enough- the fresh peaches, though not soaked in sugar water, were voted as making a sweeter pie.
The fresh peaches were also very easy to prepare - I left on the skin cause I wanted to, and I'm glad I did. It made the pie a little more colorful and helped create the better texture.
Fresh pie wins the day.
Another interesting note- I used whole wheat, unbleached white flour for the crust - it was easy to work with and resulted in a wholesome, crumbly crust.