Cherry Pie

Rainier cherries are one of my favorite summer fruits. I really wanted to turn them into a pie, but most recipes require sour cherries. That’s fine for some, but I wanted to use these bad boys, so I scoured my cookbooks and not surprisingly, I found a lot of cherry pie recipes. Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home (seen previously here and here) was the winner in using sweet cherries. He recommends Bings. I say Rainiers if you can get them. They rock just that much more.

As a side note, I’d like to mention that this is the best my pie crust, excluding the very different galette dough which I have used as pie dough here and here, has ever tasted. My friend Corey mentioned the crust to me specifically after I gave her a big piece for her and her husband to share. I am a big, big fan of this pie and you should be too.

Cherry Pie from Ad Hoc at Home:

Makes 1 double crusted pie

Crust-

2½ c. all-purpose flour plus more for rolling

1¼ tsp. salt

2½ sticks (10 oz.) unsalted butter, cut into ½” pieces and chilled

About 5 Tb. ice water

Filling-

2 Tb. cornstarch

2 Tb. water

7 c. sweet cherries, pitted

¾-1 c. granulated sugar

1 Tb. vanilla extract

1 large egg, beaten

Granulated sugar for sprinkling

Keller may prefer to make his pie doughs by hand, but I’m still a big fan of the food processor method. The instructions reflect my bias. It’s great to get your dough done ahead of time so you only have to worry about the filling/rolling out the dough, depending on if you have help/how fast you can pit cherries.

Combine the flour and salt in the work bowl of a food processor. Add in the butter and pulse a few times until the butter pieces are well incorporated and no larger than a pea. Drizzle ¼ cup of water over the top and pulse a few times until the dough just holds together when pinched.  Add the remaining tablespoon of water if the dough is very dry. Turn out of the food processor and don’t worry if it looks like a big pile of flour. Knead the dough until it is completely smooth and the butter is incorporated. This last part has always been what I have struggled with, but this time I just kneaded it more and didn’t try to add any additional water, which can make the dough tough instead of flaky and delicious.

Divide the dough in about half, with one piece slightly larger than the other. The larger piece will be for the bottom crust. Shape each half into a 1” thick disk, wrap tightly in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 1 hour. As my mom always says, you have to give the gluten time to rest.

Combine the cornstarch and the water in a small bowl, stirring to dissolve the cornstarch into a slurry.

Put 5 cups of cherries in a large bowl and set aside. Put the remaining 2 cups of cherries I a food processor and blend into a puree. Don’t worry if there are some small pieces remaining. Taste the puree to check how sweet it is.

Combine the puree and sugar (¾ cup if the cherries are very sweet, up to 1 cup if they are more tart) in a medium saucepan, bring to a simmer over medium heat, and simmer for about 30 minutes, stirring often to prevent the bottom from burning, until the mixture has reduced to 1¼ to 1½ cups. Reduce the heat to medium-low and, stirring constantly, add the cornstarch slurry.

Bring to a boil, stirring, and cook until the mixture becomes translucent again. Remove from the heat, spoon a little of the puree mixture onto a plate, and let cool slightly, then rub it between your fingertips to feel for any remaining grains of cornstarch. If necessary, cook slightly longer to dissolve the cornstarch. Transfer the filling to a medium bowl and stir in the vanilla extract. Let cool completely.      

If the dough is too hard to roll, let it rest at room temperature for a few minutes or pound it a few times with a rolling pin. Or, in my case, do both. Lightly flour the work surface and the rolling pin. Lightly dust the top of the larger disk of dough with flour and roll it out to a 13-14” round, about 1/8” thick. Roll outward from center, rotating the dough frequently and adding a little flour to the work surface or dough as needed to prevent sticking. Fold the dough in half and transfer to a 9-10” pie plate, gently easing the dough into the corners and up the sides. Roll out the second piece of dough in the same manner, to a 12” round, about 1/8” thick. Place on a parchment lined baking sheet. Refrigerate both doughs for 15 minutes. Again, resting is important.

Position one oven rack in the bottom of the oven and the other in the center and preheat to 400 degrees.

Stir the puree into the whole cherries and pour into the pie shell. At this point, if the top crust is too hard to shape, let it rest at room temperature for a few minutes. Moisten the rim of the pie shell with some of the beaten egg. Cover the filling with the top crust and press the edges together to seal and create a raised edge to the crust. Trim away the excess dough that overhangs the rim. Brush the top crust with the beaten egg and sprinkle with sugar. Using  paring knife, cut a few slits in the top of the pie for steam vents. Put on the bottom rack and bake for 20 minutes.

Lower the heat to 375 degree, move the pie to the center rack, and bake until the crust is golden and the filling is bubbling, 20 to 30 minutes. Transfer the pie to a cooling rack to cool.

According to Keller, the pie is best served 2 to 3 hours after it is baked, but it can be kept at room temperature the day it is baked or wrapped and refrigerated for up to 3 days. To heat, warm in a 325 degree oven for about 15 minutes.

I started eating this about 20 minutes after it came out of the oven. It is a fantastic summer dessert, great with or without vanilla ice cream.

New York Cheesecake

Remember how the Super Bowl happened over a month ago? Yeah, it was boring, but I made stuff for it. And then fell down the blogging hole and forgot to do anything about it at all. I’ve got posts for this and posts for other things to and I really will try to not be such a bad blogger. Really.

This was a cheesecake of disasters that managed to turn out really lovely. I forgot a block of the cream cheese, overbaked the crust, used the wrong size pan, and my stand mixer broke. Don’t worry, it was a 10 year old refurbished model, my whisk was bent, and my paddle was starting to go. So this whole thing was done with a hand mixer, my (clean) hands, and some determination. I’m sure under better circumstances this wonderful cheesecake would be even better. I’m listing the full, proper recipe below. In the future, I’m going to try this again. The cherry topping alone is worth it.

New York Cheesecake from Smitten Kitchen:

Serves many

Crumb crust

8 oz. (15 4 3/4 x 2 1/2-inch sheets of graham cracker) finely ground graham crackers or cookies such as chocolate or vanilla wafers

8 Tb. (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted

½ c. sugar

¼ tsp. salt

Very tall cheesecake filling:

5 (8 oz) packages cream cheese, softened

1¾ c. sugar

3 Tb. all-purpose flour

1 tsp. finely grated lemon zest

1 tsp. finely grated orange zest

5 large eggs

2 large egg yolks

½ tsp. vanilla

Cherry topping

10 oz. sweet or sour cherries, pitted (frozen is fine out of season)

2 Tb. lemon juice

¼ c. sugar

1 Tb. cornstarch

½ c. water

To make the crumb crust, stir together crust ingredients and press onto bottom and up the sides, stopping one inch shy of the top rim, of a buttered 9½” springform pan.  A larger pan, obviously, makes for a flatter cheesecake. So does forgetting one of the cream cheese blocks.

Preheat oven to 550 degrees. To make the filling, beat together cream cheese, sugar, flour and zest with an electric mixer until smooth. Add vanilla, then eggs and yolks, one at a time, beating on low speed until each ingredient is incorporated. Scrape bowl down between additions.

Put springform pan with crust in a shallow baking pan (to catch drips). Pour filling into crust (springform pan will be completely full) and baking in baking pan in the middle of the oven for 12 minutes or until puffed. Please watch your cake because some ovens will top-brown very quickly and if yours does too fast, turn the oven down as soon as you catch it. Mine sort of did. This was a complicated section. Reduce the temperature to 200 degrees and continue baking until cake is mostly firm (center will still be slightly wobbly when pan is gently shaken), about one hour more. Watch it doesn’t overbrown or the crust doesn’t start to burn.

Run a knife around the top edge of the cake to loosen it and cool the cake completely in springform on a rack, then chill it, loosely covered, at least 6 hours.

To make the cherry topping place all ingredients together in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil. Once it is boiling, cook it for an additional one to two minutes then remove from heat. Cool completely.

Remove side of pan and transfer cake to a plate. If you had any wonky baking issues (yo), you might need to trim the cake flat. The next day I trimmed the edges and the burnt part of the crust. And then I snacked on a lot of it. There was easy to get to cheesecake!

Spread topping over chilled cheesecake. I kept this in the fridge for a few hours before Super Bowl. With a variety of desserts, it still was very popular. And very, very good.

Vanilla Panna Cotta with Pumpkin Cherry Compote and Pumpkin-Caramel Sauce

This is probably one of the most involved desserts I have ever made. It’s not often I make something I’ve never made before plus a compote I’ve never made before PLUS a caramel sauce I’ve never made before. But it was all worth it just because it was that amazing.

I love panna cotta, but gelatin freaks me out. I think it’s just a creepy product in general. I had some at Ciao Vito the other day for happy hour and it was so tasty I thought that maybe I should do that for Thanksgiving instead of pie. For whatever reason, I decided to go pie free this year. I think it worked out. Anyway, on my search for a panna cotta recipe, I was getting a little frustrated with all the gelatin in it when I found this one, which uses agar flakes instead. Agar agar is derived from seaweed and is completely vegetarian and not creepy. It’s also better than gelatin as far as being able to reset it by reboiling the liquid. Yeah, rad. So while that recipe did use agar flakes, I didn’t want to use whole milk and buy vanilla beans, so I searched some more and found this recipe. Combining the new one, with tips from the first one, and advice from this website, I got a solid panna cotta recipe. Good deal.

But you can’t just have panna cotta! You need some sort of fruit thing and a sauce. So I searched from pumpkin recipes on epicurious.com, as there would be no pumpkin pie, and found this compote and this sauce and as a result, made a dessert. I made all three the day before Thanksgiving and I think it worked out really well. It’s also really easy to veganize. Just replace the heavy cream with soy cream for the panna cotta and the sauce and oil based margarine for the butter in the compote and sauce.

Vanilla Panna Cotta with Pumpkin Cherry Compote and Pumpkin-Caramel Sauce from my brain and David Lebovitz as well as Gourmet and Bon Appétit via epicurious.com:

Serves 6 and makes a ton of extra compote and sauce

For the panna cotta:
4 c. heavy cream
½ c. sugar
2 tsp. vanilla extract
4½ Tb. agar flakes
6 Tb. cold water

For the compote:
½ c. dried tart cherries
2 Tb. unsalted butter
½ c. packed brown sugar
¼ c. granulated sugar
2 Tb. lemon juice
¼ tsp. cinnamon
1/8 tsp. salt
2 c. fresh pumpkin (preferably sugar or cheese pumpkin), peeled, seeded, and cut into 1/4-inch dice

For the sauce:
¼ c. unsalted butter
½ c. sugar
1 c. heavy whipping cream
½ c. canned pure pumpkin



Heat the heavy cream and sugar in a saucepan. Once the sugar is dissolved, stir in the vanilla extract. Bring to a boil.

Meanwhile, lightly oil six cups with a neutral-tasting oil. Sprinkle the agar over the cold water in a medium-sized bowl and let stand 10 minutes.



Whisk in agar and simmer, whisking, until completely dissolved, about 15 minutes. Cool panna cotta slightly. Pour into glasses and chill until set, at least 2 hours.

To make the compote, deal with your pain of a pumpkin first. Seriously, peeling, seeding, and dicing a pumpkin is ridiculously involved. It took me forever and probably would have taken longer if I hadn’t remembered my mini-prep food processor part way in. After that is all set, soak cherries in hot water to cover until softened, about 15 minutes, then drain.





Melt butter in a large skillet over moderate heat. Add sugars, lemon juice, cinnamon, and salt, then cook, stirring until smooth. Add pumpkin and drained cherries and simmer, covered, stirring occasionally, until pumpkin is tender, 8 to 12 minutes.





The sauce is really easy, but kind of weird. I’ve never made caramels or caramel sauce, so this was all new to me. Melt butter in heavy small saucepan over medium heat. Add sugar and cook until mixture is deep amber, stirring constantly, about 8 minutes. The mixture will be grainy. Reduce heat to medium-low. Add cream. It was at this point that my caramel mixture became solid and freaked me out. It says in the original recipe that the mixture will bubble, but that took a little while. Stir until caramel bits dissolve, about 2 minutes. Add pumpkin and stir until heated. Refrigerate until cold, about 2 hours.



To assemble, run a sharp knife around the edge of each panna cotta and unmold each onto a serving plate. Drizzle with sauce (I took mine out a little before serving) and scoop on compote.

I thought that this was ridiculously delicious. The panna cotta was a little more solid that I would have liked, but for my first time making it and messing with a couple of different recipes, I thought it came out rather well. The compote was sweet, but not too sweet and the sauce was just dang delicious. I may never make the compote again just because of how difficult it was to deal with that pumpkin, but I might modify it with apple or something like that. This is such a pretty dessert and I’d love to show it off again.