Miscellaneous berry pies
Unfortunately, I didn't use recipes for these pies. Next time I'll make them, I'll keep better track of the measurements.
Crust:
Whole wheat flour
honey (or cane syrup or brown sugar, or whatever you like as sweetener, although sucralose or aspartame would be gross)
(aspartame, besides, will decompose at baking temperatures. -CH)
spices (depends on what you like, and what kind of fruit you have. I like ginger, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, and a bit of allspice)
butter
ice water
Combine your flour and spices well (if you are using a solid sweetener, add it now). Using a pastry cutter, or knives, or a fork, cut in the butter. It should be crumbly looking. Add honey. Mix around as well as you can. Make a well and add the ice water by tablespoons. Mix each tablespoon in. Stop as soon as the dough is holding together well enough to work with. You could also eliminate this last step and just press the ingredients into a pie plate, but if you want to be able to roll the dough out, you need to do it.
Turn the dough out onto a floured surface. Knead gently just until dough is a fairly smooth, rollable consistency. Then, roll it out, and put it in your pie plate.
You can do this in a normal pie plate with or without a top crust. Or, if you want mini pies, you can use a muffin tin pretty well, but grease the cups first.
Fruit:
This is how I did a blueberry, huckleberry, blackberry mixture that we collected in Kisatchie National Forest, Louisiana, in early June. It's pretty much what you'll find if you look up berry pies in any decent cookbook.
berries (around 3-4 cups for a full size pie)
sugar (although I use honey just fine) (I also don't use much if my berries are really good).
tablespoon flour
spices (again, whatever you like, and whatever you think goes with you fruit)
butter
Mix everything together. put in pie plate. Dot top with butter. Put on top crust if using. bake till done. probably around 375 for close to an hour. It helps to cover then edges with foil and take it off only for the last 20 minutes or so.
Of course, you could also do a crumb topping. Depending on the freshness and flavor of the berries, you may want to just barely cook them. If this is the case, I recommend the tiny pies so that you can bake the crust most of the way before hand, and then add the berries and not have to cook them to death.
-AM
Mulberry pies:
I collected about a quart of mulberries from a tree in the athletic field near the apartment in late June. I got two store-bought frozen pie crusts, filled one with a mixture of the berries and honey, used the other crust for the top, and baked it until it was done. My father thought it needed more sugar, but I thought it was fine.
Elderberry, currant and walnut pies:
We have elder and black walnut trees just outside the apartment. We discovered lots of currant bushes across the road, though we’d missed most of the fruit by the time we found them. We made a pie of elderberries with a few currants and walnuts thrown in. I thought it was good. We brought it to a barbecue, though, where it wasn’t immensely popular, though this may have been a result of peoples’ preference for bratwurst.
I recently included a handful of elderberries in a mushroom wine sauce for chicken, and recommend them for this purpose.
-CH