The Perfect Imperfections of Blueberry Pie
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/magazine/the-perfect-imperfections-of-blueberry-pie.html Version 0 of 1. “You’re never going to get a perfect blueberry pie,” said Miriam Foster, cheerfully. “That’s the whole point of blueberry pie!” Foster is a baker who, with her husband, Grayson Murphy, runs the Orient Country Store on the East End of Long Island. Her pies are perfect. I was in line there once, and a tween pointed to one on the countertop. “That is like the Beyoncé of pastries,” she said. “There is literally nothing wrong with it.” I was complaining to Foster that my pies did not share that quality. Sometimes they were runny inside. Other times they were viscid and sticky. I told her I wanted advice. It was high blueberry season. It was time for great pie. “A lot of things depend,” she said. “What are you using as a thickener?” I’d tried cornstarch, I said. I’d tried flour. “No to flour,” Foster said. “I do not like it. It tastes like flour. Flour is for cakes. It makes pie gummy and goopy and gloopy. All the ‘g’ words. What you want is arrowroot.” Brooks Headley, who was the much-lauded pastry chef at Del Posto in New York before he departed to cook vegetarian food at his much-lauded Superiority Burger, said he was in agreement. “Blueberries have a very specific pectin-ness that I’ve never quite mastered,” he said, meaning that sometimes they jell and sometimes they don’t. You could use cornstarch to help them, he said, or tapioca, but he cautioned that these “would maybe end up being too slippery.” So he seconded the use of arrowroot, a starch taken from the Caribbean plant of that name. “From the rhizomes of a tuber!” he said. Arrowroot works as a pie thickener when it is heated. The starch bonds with water molecules and begins to swell. The process stabilizes and thickens the fruit. Kierin Baldwin, the pastry chef at Locanda Verde and before that the Dutch, where she was heralded for her pies, told me arrowroot needs a fairly high temperature to kick into action. She declared herself “a big fan of prethickening.” Baldwin uses cornstarch in her pies because it’s difficult to buy arrowroot in bulk, but said the technique would hold for arrowroot. She takes a cup of blueberries off the top of the eight or so that she uses to make the filling for a nine-inch pie and combines it with not a lot of sugar and a few tablespoons of starch, then whizzes it up with a blender and cooks it quickly over high heat until it just begins to thicken. “The trick is, it burns easily,” she said, “so you have to whisk it constantly, and then get it off the heat as soon as it turns thick. It’s going to seem really thick. But when you mix it back in with the raw blueberries, and they release their juices in the oven, it’s going to even out.” Still, she cautioned, it’s blueberries. Sometimes they set up more thickly than others. (There are many, many varieties of the fruit, though they are usually sold simply as blueberries. “The aristocrat of soft fruit,” the British food writer Jane Grigson once wrote. They do as they like.) “Just make sure you let the pie cool down long enough,” Baldwin said. “It’ll keep thickening as it cools.” Her advice turned out to be awesome. Arrowroot and prethickening are the twin secrets of great blueberry pie. Do not neglect your pie shell, however. I like an all-butter crust, though “The Joy of Cooking” calls for one made with shortening, and Julia Child did the same. Some cooks use lard. But if you use high-fat, European-style butter, and everything’s cold when you make it, and you freeze the dough before deploying it, a butter-filled pie crust is very hard to beat. In keeping with more of Baldwin’s guidance, though, prebake the bottom before filling the pie. “Blueberries are so juicy,” she said. “If you don’t prebake, the bottom gets gloopy” — that dreaded g-word again. And for the top, a lattice is best, or a top cut out with a cookie cutter in some seasonally appropriate design. You want some openings in the crust — to let off steam, to allow the blueberries to cook down. Of course, sometimes they don’t. Perfection is a fool’s mission when it comes to blueberry pie. What you want is a recipe to help even the odds. Recipe: Blueberry Pie |