I just ate some of the blueberry kuchen I made this afternoon. The blueberry filling was great, a little bit sweet and just enough sour. Nick licked his plate, asked for more, and licked his plate again. Mike served himself a good helping, finished it, and pronounced it good.
The thing is that it would have been better with a regular pie crust underneath. My recipe is so close to pie crust, I don't understand how it came out crumbly, almost soggy, and not flaky. Now that I think of it, I said the same thing when I made it last year. I'm going to write on my recipe page so that I remember to try changing it next year.
So here's what I think you should make if you happen to have six or seven cups of handpicked blueberries to use up:
Blueberry Pie
Blend well:
1 cups flour
1/3 cups butter or lard
1/4 tsp salt
2 Tbsp brown sugar
Sprinkle:
3 Tbsp cold water over dough
Toss lightly with a fork until just blended. Form a ball and roll it out on a lightly floured board and place into a deep 9" pie pan. Using butter for the crust will make the dough more difficult to work with and less flaky, but it improves the flavor. Sometimes, I use a mix of butter and lard. I added the sugar to my standard pie crust recipe because my original recipe called for sugar in the crust and I think the berries could use the sweet flavor.
Put 3 cups blueberries into the pie shell.
Combine:
2 Tbsp flour
2/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
Sprinkle this mixture evenly over the blueberries in the pie shell. Bake at 375 degrees for 45 to 55 minutes, until the pie bubbles a bit and begins to smell good. I've noticed that food always smells just right when it's ready to come out of the oven.
Just after you take the pie out of the oven, add 2 to 3 cups blueberries to the top of the baked blueberries and let it cool. This should fill the deep dish pie shell. The fresh berries make the top of the pie so pretty and they cook just a little bit on the ones that are hot out of the oven.
This pie gives me a deep sense of summer. All I need to build a meal around it is a thick slab of beefsteak tomato with basil and cottage cheese, corn on the cob, and a tall glass of Grandma's sweet iced tea. It stinks that I'm stuck eating a tiny slice of my pie and that my iced tea has to be made with fake sweetener. So goes it in the life of a woman who's almost diabetic. Still, even my tiny slice has given me that feeling, of picking my berries with two hands, of looking up now and then to scan the mountain face, of feeling the heat of the sun and the cool of the breeze over the river.
Thank you for listening, jb
The thing is that it would have been better with a regular pie crust underneath. My recipe is so close to pie crust, I don't understand how it came out crumbly, almost soggy, and not flaky. Now that I think of it, I said the same thing when I made it last year. I'm going to write on my recipe page so that I remember to try changing it next year.
So here's what I think you should make if you happen to have six or seven cups of handpicked blueberries to use up:
Blueberry Pie
Blend well:
1 cups flour
1/3 cups butter or lard
1/4 tsp salt
2 Tbsp brown sugar
Sprinkle:
3 Tbsp cold water over dough
Toss lightly with a fork until just blended. Form a ball and roll it out on a lightly floured board and place into a deep 9" pie pan. Using butter for the crust will make the dough more difficult to work with and less flaky, but it improves the flavor. Sometimes, I use a mix of butter and lard. I added the sugar to my standard pie crust recipe because my original recipe called for sugar in the crust and I think the berries could use the sweet flavor.
Put 3 cups blueberries into the pie shell.
Combine:
2 Tbsp flour
2/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
Sprinkle this mixture evenly over the blueberries in the pie shell. Bake at 375 degrees for 45 to 55 minutes, until the pie bubbles a bit and begins to smell good. I've noticed that food always smells just right when it's ready to come out of the oven.
Just after you take the pie out of the oven, add 2 to 3 cups blueberries to the top of the baked blueberries and let it cool. This should fill the deep dish pie shell. The fresh berries make the top of the pie so pretty and they cook just a little bit on the ones that are hot out of the oven.
This pie gives me a deep sense of summer. All I need to build a meal around it is a thick slab of beefsteak tomato with basil and cottage cheese, corn on the cob, and a tall glass of Grandma's sweet iced tea. It stinks that I'm stuck eating a tiny slice of my pie and that my iced tea has to be made with fake sweetener. So goes it in the life of a woman who's almost diabetic. Still, even my tiny slice has given me that feeling, of picking my berries with two hands, of looking up now and then to scan the mountain face, of feeling the heat of the sun and the cool of the breeze over the river.
Thank you for listening, jb
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