Sour Cherry Pie

It was so nice to have a pie of lovely whole cherries!

Notice the baked outer edge of the crust that was prebaked to avoid the soggy crust often found in fruit pies.

Ta da!

Sour cherries are one of Todd's favorite things. On a whim last year I made a pie from cherries from the farmer's market.  Without a cherry pitter I spent an afternoon in front of the TV cutting the pits out with knife and ended up with pink fingers.  I briefly looked for a reasonably priced pitter and then cherry season was over.

This year I saw an article in the NY Times about twice baked sour cherry pie and I was inspired to make one.  Since I'd never managed to buy a cherry pitter and I didn't want pink fingers and whole cherries look better I got creative.  Thinking about the mechanism I realized that a cherry pitter is just something that holds the cherry in place and then pokes the pit out.  So I came up with a chopstick and the handle of a measuring cup and presto!  Turns out you barely need the measuring cup handle - you can just hold the cherry and use the chopstick to push the pit through the hole left by the cherry stem.

Aside from being a recipe for sour cherry pie, this recipe has a great crust.  The crust is baked before you fill it so it is flaky and tasty.  For the crust we used rendered lard from Flying Pigs Farm and whole wheat pastry flour from Bob's Red Mill.  Previously I'd tried the pie crusts from Flying Pigs Farm and they were delicious.  Unfortunately when I stopped by this time they were all sold out so I got rendered lard instead.  Conveniently the sour cherry pie article in the NY Times that inspired this dish also included a pie crust recipe.  The texture of the pie crust was delicious but a little soft, I think because the ratios of lard to flour were a little off because we used lard and whole wheat pastry flour.  We'll maybe use a little less lard next time but I'm tempted to do a twice baked pie crust all the time now.  Maybe I'll combine the twice baked method with the wisdom gathered from this delicious pie experiment.