For the second pie of Easter Sunday, Matt decided to pull out the blueberry sour cream pie he’s been talking about for a while. Kate’s Easter pie was chocolatey, so we needed a fruity pie. It was a lot easier than last week’s cannoli pie. Blueberries, sour cream, an egg, some flour and sugar, and a crumble topping (which got doubled, and thank goodness – it still was almost not enough). Unfortunately, when he took it out of the oven and placed it on our stove range to cool, someone who shall remain nameless had forgotten to turn the range off. So there’s a big black circle on the bottom of the pie now. Only half of the pie was edible.
But the story of this pie is that despite the fact that we had an Easter dinner with 13 people, and despite the fact that the Easter Pie’s rice krispie crust was a bit tough, and despite the fact that everyone knows blueberries are one of the most underrated fruits out there, and despite the fact that Annie believes that sour cream is one of the major food groups, exactly TWO people even attempted to put a bite of this pie in their mouth. And Leah the Blueberry Lover, though she said she liked it, didn’t finish her piece. Matt has never been more disappointed in his family.
This pie was fantastic. Creamy, crunchy, flavorful, and just about perfect. It was better than the cannoli pie. It was better than the unicorn pie. It was definitely better than the Easter pie, even with its excellent chocolate pudding. It might not have been better than the apple pie, but that’s nigh impossible, and it was really close. Seriously, this pie was definitely in the top three if not the top two of all the pies we’ve made this year (still thinking about Kate’s chocolate fudge pie…). AND MATT IS THE ONLY ONE WHO HAD THE GOOD SENSE TO EAT IT.
After my epic failure last time around (see Butterscotch Banana Cream Pie), I needed an epic redemption. So I created a new kind of pie: Cannoli pie. You can search up recipes with the title “Cannoli Pie” on the Internet, but they all have a regular ol’ pie crust and the filling is usually cream-cheese-based. They’ll have pistachios or chocolate chips and that’s supposed to make it taste like the deep-fried ricotta-cheese goodness of a cannoli? No thank you. Although it’s admittedly been quite a long time since I’ve actually had a cannoli, I have many fond memories of Mike’s Pastry in Boston, discovering what a good Italian pastry can do for a person. I needed to re-create that in pie form.
It’s pretty simple: cannolis have a deep-fried shell and a sweetened ricotta cheese filling. All I’d need to do is get a recipe for actual cannolis and turn the cylindrical shell into a bowl-shaped pie crust, and throw in the filling. But the hard part was going to be how to deep-fry dough and have it keep the shape of a pie. After discussing it with our friend Bryan, he suggested getting some wire mesh and making a form. So that’s what I did. I found some small-gauge chicken wire at Michael’s, and after a couple of attempts (yes, I did this two times this week in preparation for today’s actual pie), I figured out that the best way was to use one sheet of wire for the bottom, shaped into pie form, then another as sort of a cap to press the dough down as it bubbles and rises in the oil:
I even used some extra wire to make a handle to pull it out of the oil.
The other thing I needed to figure out was that all the cannoli recipes I could find called for white wine as an ingredient in the pastry. That’s not something we have or want to have around the house, so I read online that white wine vinegar was an adequate substitute. So we got some of that, and the first practice pastry used vinegar. It was a bit smelly, and the kids got turned off. When all was said and done, you could definitely taste it in the crust, and although it wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t the best. A little more research revealed that the wine/vinegar is used for flavor, but mostly for its acidity – it makes the gluten soft and elastic, which means you can roll it out thin which makes it crispier when fried (I learned that through trial and error too). Another acidic liquid you can use is buttermilk. That had the same effect on the dough, but it tasted a lot better.
Anyway, after placing the dough into the two-part form, when inserted into the pot of oil, it was necessary to use a mason jar to push it down, as the frying dough floats.
Thank you, Olsons, for the Christmas hot chocolate mix. You helped make cannoli pie possible.
It worked perfectly. The result was a deep-fried pie shell that looks like a cannoli shell:
The chicken-wire indentations actually add to the blistery texture, don’t they?
Then it was just a matter of whipping up some ricotta cheese with powdered sugar, vanilla, whipped cream, and mini chocolate chips. I found several recipes with very different ratios of ingredients, so I just kind of did it to taste – that also meant I got to keep snitching it over and over. Fearing that the filling-to-shell ratio would be a little out of whack, though, I fried a bunch of dough stars (using Kate’s Pay-doh cookie cutter) and arranged them on the top. Then a dusting of powdered sugar.
Behold the cannoli pie!
How did it taste? Just like a cannoli! The kids weren’t thrilled about the somewhat grainy texture of ricotta cheese. Shelly even reminded me that when she orders a cannoli, she’ll get a chocolate mousse one for that reason too. But this pie had a crunch and that sweet creamy goodness, and mini chocolate chips, and it was like I was back in the North End. Only eating pie. It was fantastic. Now I just need to think of what other pies could use a deep-fried crust..
-Matt
Crust recipe: 2C flour, 2 T sugar, 1/4 t salt, Half a stick of butter, 1 egg, enough buttermilk to make it stick together.
Realizing that the girls may never have had a traditional banana cream pie, Matt decided to introduce them to it, but with a twist. Following this recipe, he cooked up brown sugar, butter, and cream into homemade butterscotch. It’s possible he may have cooked it a little too long, as there was a detectable metallic burnt tinge to the filling. This wasn’t the most popular pie, even among our banana lovers. It was better the next day (after chilling), but it was the first pie of the year where some of it ended up in the trash can.
One of our favorite new pies that we tried out in November 2018 was the Atlantic Beach Pie, on the recommendation of Matt’s brother. It’s basically a lemon curd pie (based on sweetened condensed milk), but the real kicker is the saltine-cracker crust. The sweet and salty combination was awesome. So for Matt’s first pie of 2019, he chose to do it again, but this time with lime instead of lemon. After all, it’s very close to a traditional key lime pie. It turned out fantastic, but honestly, it’s better in lemon.
The Pie Project 