Apron Free Cooking ~ Strawberry Pie

By Noel Lizotte

My grand­mother, Dora, was a huge fan of straw­berry pie. She believed you could tell the class of a restau­rant by the qual­ity of their straw­berry pie. She passed the same appre­ci­a­tion on to her daugh­ters and grand­daugh­ters. Along with this appre­ci­a­tion, she passed along the best recipe she could find for straw­berry pie.

We have always made it a point to serve this pie at Mother’s Day din­ners. Straw­ber­ries are just com­ing into sea­son at the same time of year as Mother’s Day arrives, so it’s a good match we think.

Straw­berry Pie

Serv­ings per recipe: 8

1 9-inch pie crust shell

1 lb strawberries

1 cup sugar

3 TB corn­starch

1/8 tsp salt

1 cup water

3 TB straw­berry gelatin pow­der mix

Pre­pare and bake a 9-inch pie crust. My mom’s recipe is sim­ple and always turns out per­fect (for her, I’m still prac­tic­ing!) Rinse and slice straw­ber­ries into quar­ters, or 1/2 to 1-inch chunks. Place the straw­ber­ries in the cooled pie shell.

Com­bine sugar, corn­starch and salt in a bowl. Stir until well mixed. This helps keep the corn­starch from clump­ing when you add it to the water. Place water and corn­starch mix­ture in a small saucepan and heat over low to medium heat until thick­ened. Stir con­stantly to pre­vent clumps from form­ing. The mix­ture should resem­ble a thick syrup. Add the straw­berry gelatin pow­der and mix well.

Pour the syrup over the straw­ber­ries in pie shell and chill in refrig­er­a­tor. Allow the pie to chill for 2 hours to allow the gelatin to set firmly.

We usu­ally make this pie a day ahead of time to allow the gelatin to set. How­ever, if you plan your day well and get an early start, you can make this pie and serve for a late after­noon meal.

Make it a meal: Grandma always served this pie with strong cof­fee and topped with whipped cream. If you’re feel­ing adven­tur­ous, place a scoop of vanilla ice cream on the side of the pie. Grandpa liked ice cream with his pie!

Approx­i­mate Nutri­tional Value per serv­ing: Calo­ries: 196, Fat: 2g, Cho­les­terol: 0mg, Sodium: 148mg, Total Carbs: 45g, Dietary Fiber: 1g, Sug­ars: 37g, Pro­tein: 2g

Since this recipe yields a sin­gle pie, you may want to dou­ble the recipe if you’re plan­ning to serve more than eight peo­ple, or if you expect to have left­overs. This recipe calls for fresh straw­ber­ries; I’ve not attempted it with frozen berries. I’m not sure the con­sis­tency would work as well. If you try it with frozen berries, please let me know how it turns out.

If you want to add some color and fla­vor, you can add fresh blue­ber­ries to the pie shell with the straw­ber­ries. I like this com­bi­na­tion for 4th of July picnics!

Noel Lizotte is break­ing free of cor­po­rate stress with con­ve­nience cook­ing! www.apronfreecooking.com. She also writes a monthly col­umn at www.culinary.net.

Posted by Noel Lizotte on May 15 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.