I have a new favorite pie. Jeff and I agreed to swap pies recently. I’m to make him a spinach pie, and last week he gave me his famous rhubarb custard pie in exchange. Wow. Rhubarb custard pie gets everything right that strawberry rhubarb gets wrong. The flavors complement each other beautifully, without getting too lost or intertwined. It’s tart, sweet, and creamy all at once. Totally amazing. Fortunately, Kori was visiting when it arrived at the house, or I would have eaten the whole pie by myself in a matter of days. It had this magical quality whereby you would eat one piece, and immediately need a second. But once you ate the second pi
ece, you only felt as full as if you had one piece, so you didn’t feel like a total glutton. Kori and I spent a lot of time debating just what Jeff’s crust secret is; her thought is that it reminds her of the crust of her great-grandma’s fried apple pie so we came up with all these theories about how Jeff could have fried the lattice top and then magically applied it to the pie. I ran some of these suppositions by Jeff this morning to see if I could get a reaction that would tell me we were on the right path, but he just smiled and declined to comment. I’m going to have to spend some time in the pie lab trying to figure this out.
I have a new favorite pie. Jeff and I agreed to swap pies recently. I’m to make him a spinach pie, and last week he gave me his famous rhubarb custard pie in exchange. Wow. Rhubarb custard pie gets everything right that strawberry rhubarb gets wrong. The flavors complement each other beautifully, without getting too lost or intertwined. It’s tart, sweet, and creamy all at once. Totally amazing. Fortunately, Kori was visiting when it arrived at the house, or I would have eaten the whole pie by myself in a matter of days. It had this magical quality whereby you would eat one piece, and immediately need a second. But once you ate the second pi
ece, you only felt as full as if you had one piece, so you didn’t feel like a total glutton. Kori and I spent a lot of time debating just what Jeff’s crust secret is; her thought is that it reminds her of the crust of her great-grandma’s fried apple pie so we came up with all these theories about how Jeff could have fried the lattice top and then magically applied it to the pie. I ran some of these suppositions by Jeff this morning to see if I could get a reaction that would tell me we were on the right path, but he just smiled and declined to comment. I’m going to have to spend some time in the pie lab trying to figure this out.
4 comments:
Rhubarb custard pie gets everything right that strawberry rhubarb gets wrong.
Oh! Such a gratuitous slam. Is nothing beneath you?
No, nothing. But I'm open-minded...I'm more than willing to be convinced that strawberry rhubarb is okay, I'm just not wasting any of my rhubarb on the experiment.
I totally agree with Ellen's strawberry-rhubarb slam. In my opinion, rhubarb is perfect by itself, and there is no need to ruin it (or perfectly good fresh strawberries) by cooking strawberries with it.
I have a rhubarb custard cake recipe that I adore, so I'm not surprised that the rhubarb custard pie came out well. My mouth is watering as I type.
So after reading this post I was inspired, and I went searching for recipes for rhubarb custard pie. I found a good one on a blog called Ward Street Bistro and after flunking the crust course last night, repeated it tonight. I earned a barely passing "D" grade on the crust, but the filling was sensational! Sweet and creamy, luscious and tart and rhubarb-tastic. In this pie, the rhubarb really shined. I won't go as far as Ellen and say that strawberries and rhubarb are an unholy alliance. But I will say that I've found my new favorite pie. Thanks, Pie Mistress, for writing so enticingly about the rhubarb custard pie!
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