Blueberry Pie in July

 

Did anyone besides me watch My Blueberry Nights and wonder how the writers thought it could be plausible to consume entire pies while looking fetchingly thin?  It's the magic of Hollywood. That said, the attention drawn to blueberry pie is most welcome, as indeed it is a most neglected and yet delicious fruit pie.

My theory is that people have negative experiences of fake blueberry pies (Marie Callender et al.). Fake peach and fake apple are bearable, but fake blueberry is really awful. For my purposes, canned filling + artificial flavor counts as "fake". Did you know there are these things called "blueberry chips"? They don't actually involve much in the way of blueberries, but are frequently used in commercial bagels, muffins, and the like.

If you like real blueberry muffins, you may want to give real blueberry pie a try. Unlike peaches and apples, there is no tedious peeling or pitting or slicing for the cook. It's a great choice for the 4th of July when there are other things to be working on and you want something that goes with the color scheme. 

To make this you need fresh blueberries. Either you're the kind of person who gives berries a magic pass in the "need to wash" department, or you need to wash them and then spread them out on paper towels and give them awhile to really dry. Really, really dry...because the weakness of blueberry pies is that they like to go soupy, and if you have any extra water at all, this tendency only gets worse.

I usually make Martha Stewart's, which of course actually comes from someone else. It leans towards soupy, perhaps because west coast blueberries (the big plump ones) are juicier than the tiny Maine berries, but it's very good. Cooks Illustrated, as usual, claims to have solved the soupy problem but their solution involves grated apple. Having to grate an apple goes against the whole "no bothersome fruit prep" principle. If that doesn't bother you, by all means give it a try.

...after some draining

Intrigued by the combination of lime and brown sugar, I made the blueberry pie from the Macrina Bakery Cookbook. Macrina is a much loved bakery in Seattle and the cookbook is lots of fun if you are a fan of bread and pastry. I am supposed to not be eating either bread or pastry with any regularity, alas, so I haven't gotten very far in testing it. It's one of those cookbooks that is a good read in any case, and I commend it to you for that reason alone.

The Macrina blueberry pie recipe with lime and brown sugar is amazingly delicious. Like Cooks Illustrated, some of the berries are cooked on the stove top, then the rest are added in and then both are added to the pie shell. Alas however, it was only thickened with flour, and that always means it's soupy. I don't know what the bakery does to solve this problem--perhaps they source wild organic tiny blueberries that don't exude as much juice? Because of the sloshy factor, I can't 100% recommend the recipe. On the other hand, soupy pie is excellent over vanilla ice cream, so perhaps you shouldn't let that stop you. I will probably try again next year with a bit of corn starch and tapioca.