Blueberry Pie

I was walking past my local fruit man on Friday afternoon as just as I was passing him, he started shouting “two for a pound, three for a pound”, and I found myself drawn to his table – I do love a bargain. Three boxes of blueberries of £1 – how can I walk past that??!! And boxes of blueberries only mean one thing – a good old fashioned blueberry pie, mmmmm

I found a number of recipes for a blueberry pie, but none of them really described what I had in mind, so I’ve decided to combine them all together and came up with my own one :

Blueberry Pie

Pastry
250g flour
110g cold unsalted butter, cubed
2 Tbsp sugar
½ tsp salt
zest of 1 lemon

Filling
550g blueberries
100g sugar
2 Tbsp cornflour
zest of 1 lemon
juice of 1 lemon

Glaze
1 egg, whisked with a fork

Place flour, sugar, salt and lemon zest in a food processor. Add butter, cut into 1 cm cubes. Pulse everything together, until everything resembles fine crumbs.
Add 1 Tbsp of lemon juice, pulse the mixer a bit more. Add 1 Tbsp of iced water, and pulse again, until the dough starts coming together a bit. Depending on your flour and butter, you might have to add a bit more water or lemon juice, but it shouldn’t take more than 4 Tbsp all together.
Take the pastry / crumbly mess out of the processor and pour it out on a table top. Mush everything together into something resembling a ball, wrap into gladwrap and place in the fridge for an hour. Don’t be tempted to knead the pastry together, otherwise the pastry will be rubbery and won’t come together.

Meanwhile prepare the filling – combine all the ingredients together in a bowl and set it aside.

After an hour take the pastry out of the fridge, cut about a third of it off, wrap it in gladwrap and place it back in the fridge. The rest of the pastry, roll it out of a table top, big enough to fit a pie dish. I cover my kitchen top with a piece of gladwrap before I start on the pastry to make sure that it doesn’t stick to the top and it doesn’t take too much flour. Butter you pie dish and cover it with pastry. Place all of the filling in the case and set aside.
Roll the rest of the pastry, cut it into strips, about 1 ½ cm wide and cover the top of the pie to create a cross-cross, basket-like effect. Press the top “lace” layer onto the pie case to make sure that it sticks together and brush the whole pie with egg glaze.

Bake the pie in a pre-heated oven for 50 minutes at 170C, turn the oven down to 150C and bake for further 15 minutes.


I only have one photo on the pie, as half of the pie was gone after an hour or so, so it must have been good - even the cat seems to like it :)