Sarah Tries to Make a Pie

I've always found pie incredibly intimidating. It takes so much work, especially the crust. And then if it turns out lousy, it's like a total waste of time, and you have a crappy pie sitting around your kitchen. My husband is also a pie snob. In college, he had to take bakery science classes, and now he's very "academic" when it comes to pie crust. This is another reason why I'm apprehensive about making a pie, because he's better at it than me. I don't like that.

Anyway, I got it into my head to make one after reading the current issue of ReadyMade magazine. There was a feature on Emily and Melissa Elsen, the sisters who own and bake at Four & Twenty Blackbirds cafe in Brooklyn (another place to put on my list of places to visit in NYC.) When you see the picture of these girls, you can just tell: these girls know now to make a dang pie.

See all the recipes featured here.

Cranberry Sage Pie from the ladies at Four & Twenty Blackbirds, via ReadyMade

Cranberries are in the grocery store now, so when I saw this recipe in the article, I thought I would give it a try.

So my first issue was making the crust. Dustin is working nights right now, so he was asleep during the day while I was doing this, unable to "help." Left to my own devices, I had a really hard time getting the butter pieces small enough. After a while I gave up because it was getting too warm anyway. I know I'm getting a blender for Christmas, so soon I'll just be able to mix my flour and butter the Alton Brown way, a few pulses in the blender and you're done!
Anyway, I labored through the crust. It's one of those things where you know it's wrong as you're doing it but it's too late to turn back.

I'd also never chopped up sage before and I was curious about how fresh sage would smell/taste with the cranberries. It was really REALLY fragrant and I was worried it would be too much in the pie. But I can't even taste it in the finished pie, so who knows? There's also just 1/8 + 1/2 cup sugar in this recipe which I feel like is relatively low for a pie, especially since cranberries are so tart and tangy.

And they are tangy, too. The recipe suggests serving with a generous scoop of whipped cream, and I don't know how you could eat it without it. After spooning all the filling into the crust, there was a lot of juice left in my mixing bowl, and I know that's where all the sugar ended up.



Oh well, I think it looked pretty. Not like a pie in a fancy bakery, perhaps like a pie that your great great grandmother made in her wood oven and your great great grandfather put in a lunch pail in the morning before he left home to go work his ass off. Yeah, it looked like the pie of badassness.