Summer in Oregon means blackberries by the TRUCKLOAD around our place, so I decided to put some of them to good use last night and bake my first pie!! I've made pumpkin pies in the past, but this was my first 'real' pie. I did cheat and use pre-made pie crust, but a girl's gotta start somewhere.
I doubled the recipe from:
http://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/fresh-blackberry-pie Our shop foreman at MAK has to watch his blood sugar, so I used a stevia blend instead of sugar so I could bring a pie in to celebrate his first grandbaby being born.
It took all of fifteen minutes for me to fill a gallon sized ziplock with berries.
The recipe says to mix one cup of berries with the sugar and quick-cook tapioca.
After the berries sit in the sugar mix for 15 minutes, you cook them on medium heat until they turn into a weird goopy paste.
After gently mixing in the rest of the fresh berries, I put them in their crusts, and dotted the top with 2 Tbs of butter.
Needless to say, the Martha Stewart-esque crust I had envisioned didn't exactly play out according to plan. My delicate 'fluting' on the crust gave way to mashing the two crusts together with a fork to keep the blackberries contained. The lattice top turned out somewhat better, just a little off kilter.
Onto the MAK they went!
All in all turned out pretty darn good for a first try! I think in the future I might go 50/50 on sugar/sweetener-- I forgot that some sweetners lose some of their flavor at high temps, so the pie was a little tart. Nothing a good scoop of vanilla ice cream couldn't handle though!
