Bubby's Pie Co. | www.Bubbys.com | 212-219-0666

This glazed open-face blueberry pie has the best of two worlds: the tanginess of raw blueberries and the concentrated sweetness of a simmered sauce. Serve it with a dollop of homemade crème fraîche.

Ingredients:

• Pastry for one-crust 9” pie, blind-baked and golden brown
• 1 tablespoon egg white
• 1 cup crème fraiche
• 4 cups blueberries, sorted and cleaned
• 1/2 cup water
• 2 tablespoons water + 2 tablespoons cornstarch
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice

Instructions:

A day in advance, make crème fraiche. Make and blind-bake a pastry crust. Cool crust a few minutes and, while the crust is still hot, brush the inside of the pie shell with a thin clear sheen of egg white. If any solidifies and turns white, quickly wipe it away with a paper towel. Set aside. Sort and clean 4 c of blueberries. Place 3 cups of the blueberries in a mixing bowl and set aside. Place the remaining cup of blueberries in a saucepan with 1/2 cup water and bring to boil. Simmer 3-4 minutes. Measure remaining ingredients out. In a separate bowl, mix cornstarch and water until smooth. Add the cornstarch slurry, sugar, and lemon juice to the sauce and stir until the starchy cloudiness goes and sauce thickens to a shiny blue-black. (1 minute.) Pour the hot sauce over the fresh blueberries in bowl and stir gently until all blueberries are coated. Pour blueberries into pie shell and let the pie set up for 2 hours at room temperature. Lasts 2 days at room temperature but is best the day it’s made. Serve with crème fraîche.

If you’re like many, including myself, making pastry can be the most intimidating part of pie making. I started making pies in the middle of summer, having never had a pie that I liked in my life.  It seemed like a simple enough thing to do: easy as pie and all that, and the first crust I made came out pretty well.  So I did exactly the same thing the second time but with very different (and disastrous) results.