Peach pie

I recently checked out the cookbook The Perfect Peach, written by a family who run a peach farm in California.  Not only does it have fantastic photos and great recipes, but it's also got a number of fascinating vignettes of life and work in the orchards.

Thankfully, the peaches at the store this week were in better condition than when I had shopped for the peach ginger scones, so before Dom had even gotten a shopping cart, I had already selected quite a few peaches for us.  I decided to try a peach pie even though Dom would be gone for the week; I honestly had wanted to wait until later in the week, but with the peaches ripening by the minute even in the fridge, I had to make the pie today.

Since butter (and dairy products in general) are far more expensive than on the mainland, I didn't have enough to make a 9" double-crust pie, so I figured I'd do a lattice top.  The crust took very little time to make, but that was just as well; time was very limited since it was already getting warm in the kitchen, and the oven wasn't even on yet.  I ended up using 1.5 recipes' worth of an all-butter recipe I had found before, and my tiny Cuisinart did the job admirably.

I would have woven the lattice, but the dough was warming up already and I had to really hustle to get the strips of dough laid out and back into the fridge before the butter melted.  I also discovered I need a better way to transfer the lattice to the pie, as the lattice defied my expectations by sticking to the parchment paper in places.

Quick notes

• Most recipes call for sliced peaches, apples, etc. when making fruit pies.  I find that chunks work better, both in terms of prep time and in terms of the texture of the finished product.  For whatever reason I find it easier to slice a pie of fruit chunks rather than a pie of thin fruit slices.
• Like many other instances, I used less sugar than called for; the recipe says to use 3/4 c. granulated sugar, while I used a little under 2/3 c.  Probably more of a case of having to adjust to the fruit's inherent sweetness.
• Lemon juice seems to be the acid of choice when making peach pies.  I substituted lime juice out of necessity, which I thought would lead to a better taste in the finished product, but this is 100% subjective.  In the end, the baking process seemed to have toned down the overt lime flavor, though I'm convinced that lime juice is a better choice than lemon juice.  Again, totally subjective!

Frankly, the peaches were tasty enough at this point that I could have eaten them without the crust.  Or without baking.

• I should take care to ensure that the pieces of peach lie flatter in the crust.  As you can see in the photos, I sort of just dumped the bowl of peaches and juice into the pie crust without much regard to orientation.  This causes the lattice to become sort of distorted.  It still tasted great; it simply wasn't as aesthetically pleasing.

Pie before baking.  I had a moment of panic when I flipped over the parchment paper with the lattice and some of the dough stuck, but it seems to look all right after all that.

• Many peach pie recipes, this one included, indicate that one should dot the top of the filling with butter before putting the top crust on.  I didn't have enough butter for this and I also had seen firsthand how much butter had gone into making the crust.  However, while the pie was baking, I noticed that the peaches on top of the filling started looking a little dried-out.  Maybe the butter helps prevent the filling from drying in the oven?  Ultimately, the pie tasted just fine, even if the peaches were a little wrinkly on top.  Much as I would have loved to put butter on top of the filling, it's probably ok that I couldn't.

Pie after baking!  I had not sprinkled sugar on top of the pie, though if I'd been making this for a dinner party or something, I probably would have.

• I baked the pie for about 55 minutes at 400°F.  I had put the pie in the oven without the crust protector at first, but then took the pie out at 20 minutes to fit the crust protector around, then baked for about 30 more minutes plus my "I'll stand in front of the oven and monitor until it looks done and/or I start to get impatient and/or concerned" phase.
• The juices in the filling were still a little runny, which would have made slicing and plating a bit problematic had I been serving this for other folks instead of just me.  I used about 3 1/2 Tbsp. of flour, which is right in the 3-4 Tbsp. range called for in the recipe.  Perhaps next time I should try using one of the recipe's other suggested thickeners instead (tapioca flour or instant tapioca), neither of which should be too difficult to find around here.

Tasty!

My next kitchen experiment is to freeze slices of this pie for when Dom gets back next week.  Though I could try to hold myself to one slice per day, I still probably shouldn't consume the entire pie on my own.

Addendum, 19 September: Thanks to Betty Crocker (and unfortunately, no thanks to our usually-trusty Joy of Cooking which only provided instructions on freezing unbaked pies), I was able to freeze roughly 4 slices of the pie.  I simply put the entire pie plate, obviously more than half empty, into the freezer; after several hours, I wrapped the pie in plastic wrap as best as I could.  We'll see in a couple of days whether or not it worked!

Addendum, 2 October: Apparently I had forgotten to update.  The thawed pie was, to me, just as tasty as it had been before freezing, with perhaps a slight decrease in texture.  Not a bad solution to the problem of how to preserve a baked pie, but of course the ideal would probably be to eat the entire thing before it would have to be frozen. :)

The Perfect Peach (2013): pages unknown as I was using an unpaginated ebook version.

Writeup background music: the soundtrack for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Since Dom is gone, I'm on a 6-day Star Wars marathon, which I started Monday.