Cobbler, schmobbler.
For me, a pie is just peachy
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, June 03, 2008Think of fresh Hill Country peaches, and you can almost feel the juice trickling down your chin.
Well, grab some napkins, 'cause peaches are here.
The first batch popped up at local farmers' markets several weeks ago, but June marks the height of the season in Central Texas, specifically Gillespie County, where about a third of the state's peaches are grown....
Now, what to do with those heavenly peaches? Jams, cobblers and even smoothies are grand, but for me it's all about the pie. And I promise this column won't be just all stories of my grandmother's incredible cooking, but it would be baking betrayal not to share her peach pie recipe.
This is my favorite of her pies, and she always makes one for me when I visit my hometown, but I'd never seen her actually put the thing together.
So when my grandmother and mother were both in town last week, we made a pie using fresh peaches I bought from a roadside farm stand in Oak Hill.
My grandmother Carolyn Cook started by sifting the flour for her never-fail pie crust, which uses shortening instead of butter, while my mom and I peeled and sliced a large basket of peaches.
"You know, I don't do this at home," my grandmother said of the exact measuring. "I've always done it by guess and by gosh. Hardly anybody measured anything back then."
Despite, or perhaps because of, the exact measuring, this particular pie crust didn't turn out exactly as she'd hoped. After she rolled out the dough circles, they fell apart when she picked them up to assemble the pie. Like a true cook, she didn't throw her hands up in despair, but instead pieced the dough back together like a puzzle for both the bottom and top crusts.
As for the filling, the smaller peaches I'd bought added up on the shy end of the 4 cups required for the filling, so my grandmother added a half cup of blackberries and raspberries, which added a nice color and tartness to the final pie.
With this improvisational attitude, she can use this same recipe to make just about any fruit pie, just as long as the total amount of fruit equals about 4 cups and the amount of sugar is adjusted to taste.
The pie went in the oven for about an hour, and when it came out, it might not have looked flawless, but it sure tasted that way.
I don't know about you, but I prefer a pieced-together pie crust that is savory, light and flaky than one that looks perfect but tastes like it came out of a freezer.
It's the same way with peaches themselves. The small, dark, less-than-perfectly round ones we used for this pie were much tastier than the picture-perfect peaches I bought at the grocery store earlier this year.
Perfection, just as in life, isn't the goal in the kitchen.
And that's the great thing about a good pie. Unless you burn it, there's little you can do to it that a good dollop of ice cream can't fix.
