With gluten-free baking, achieving a firm crust can be a challenge, but if you follow my recipe, you will be able to bake whatever pie you can think about!

With this recipe, you will obtain two crusts that will fill a 9-inch pie plate, one for the bottom, and another one to cover it! Of course, if you want to make pies without any cover, you can use both to cover the pie plate.

This recipe is very easy, but you have to be careful. You will need a food processor to blend the butter and flour without making a homogeneous dough. We want to obtain a grainy sand of little butter pieces covered in flour. After that, we will incorporate liquid to bind everything. Thanks to this process, we will obtain a flaky crust!

So now prepare your own crusts and fill the pie with whatever you want! Or you can follow my blueberry pie recipe that goes perfect with this crust.

The Best Pie Crust

Recipe by Giovanni PamparanaCourse: Dessert, MainCuisine: AmericanDifficulty: Easy

Servings

2

crusts

Prep time

30

minutes

Cooking time

40

minutes

A pie crust recipe that will yield two portions that will be useful to make either a sweet or savoury 9-inch pie with a bottom crust and its cover. You won’t believe how golden they get!

Ingredients

• 370 g of our gum-free flour mix

• 1 tbsp sugar (omit for savoury)

• 1 tsp salt

• ½ tsp xanthan gum

• 230 g very cold unsalted butter cut into ½ cm cubes

• 90 g ice water (6 tbsp)

• 3 tbsp Greek yogurt

• 1 tbsp rice vinegar (or apple cider)

Directions

• In a food processor, blend the flour, sugar, salt, and xanthan gum.
• Add the butter to the food processor and pulse until you see that everything is combined (like sand without visible pieces of butter). Do not over blend!
• Add the water, yogurt and vinegar to the food processor, and start pulsing until you see that the dough has formed (around 20-30 times). Again, try not to over blend so the butter doesn’t incorporate more than it needs. This is the trick to get a flaky dough.
• Bring everything together and divide the dough in two.
• Form a disk of dough with each (not so thin, around 5 inches) and wrap them in plastic.
• Let them cool in the fridge for at least one hour before using them to build a pie.
• Try to make our Blueberry Pie with this recipe! You won’t regret it!

The post The Best Pie Crust appeared first on The Gluten-Free Corner.

Preparing the filling of this pie is extremely easy and takes very little time. You will need to cook half of the blueberries and crush them a bit with a potato masher to release liquid and reduce the blueberries quite a bit. This purple reduction mixed with the cornstarch will provide the foundation for the whole blueberries and sugar that are going to be incorporated later. By doing this, the result will be a nice homogeneous filling inside the pie.

The trick to getting a vibrant and intense purple colour of the filling is the lemon juice. The lemon juice accentuates the colour of a lot of berries, that is why almost always you add a small amount of lemon juice to jams, jellies or other reductions. It is really incredible how the colour changes when you add it and after you cook it!

For this recipe, we are going to use our gluten-free pie crust recipe that yields the bottom and top layers for a 9-inch pie plate! If you haven’t seen it, you can follow this link to make it beforehand! Be aware that you need some time for the dough to cool before you can use it here. You can always try to find some pre-made gluten-free pie shells, but you would need to figure out the cooking times for those ones, as well as how much filling would work with the size of the one you have (I am sorry about that). One thing that is a must, is that the blueberry filling must be bubbling hot when you take it out from the oven, that is the signal that the filling is ready!

If you follow my crust recipe, you will need to have a 9-inch pie plate and a rolling pin to roll the crust dough. A silicone mat is really useful to prevent the dough from sticking. For the pie plate, I used a metallic one with a removable base. It allowed me to have the nice curves in the border, to have a nice browning on the bottom shell, and to remove the pie and plate it elsewhere!

You will also need a large saucepan where you can fit 600 gr of the blueberries to cook them (around 3-4 cups of blueberries) and something to press and crush the blueberries while they are cooking (like a potato masher).

Here we go with the recipe!

Awesome Blueberry Pie

Recipe by Giovanni PamparanaCourse: DessertCuisine: AmericanDifficulty: Medium

Servings

8

servings

Prep time

15

minutes

Cooking time

1

hour 

This blueberry pie is the combination of the freshness of summer with the right amount of sweetness inside a pie that you won’t get tired of it!

Ingredients

• 1 batch of our gluten-free pie crust recipe
  (1 batch makes two crusts)

• 1200 g blueberries

• 1 shredded peeled apple without the core

• 150 g sugar (3/4 cup aprox)

• 2 tbsp cornstarch

• 2 tbsp lemon juice

• A pinch of salt

• 1 egg white lightly beaten to brush

Directions

• Take out the crusts dough from the fridge to allow them to warm a bit before rolling them.
• Preheat the oven to 425ºF/220ºC.
• Put half of the blueberries (600 g) in a large saucepan and cook them for about 8-10 minutes at medium heat. While they are cooking, crush them with a potato masher or something similar to break the blueberries and release the juices.
  During the cooking time, the blueberry sauce that you are making should be reduced by half approximately or the original volume of uncrushed blueberries.
• Let the reduced blueberry sauce to cool off a bit.
• Meanwhile, drain the shredded apple with a clean cloth to remove the excess of water. Incorporate the shredded apple, sugar, salt, lemon juice, cornstarch and the rest of the blueberries to the reduced blueberry sauce and mix well to homogenize everything.
• Roll in a silicone mat (or in between two plastic wrap pieces) the crust dough into a 12-inch circle. You can help yourself with a little cornstarch in the rolling pin or in the dough if it is way too sticky, but it is better not to use any.
• Place the rolled dough into the 9-inch pie plate carefully so the dough doesn’t break. Remove and discard the excess from the borders (you can use that excess if you left a part of the crust too thin comprated to the rest).
• Roll the other crust into a 12-inch circle. Cut a hole in the middle and 6 more around the center one equally distanced. (you can be creative in this part if you want )
• Fill the blueberry mixture into the already placed pie crust being careful not to overfill the borders. It will become more liquid when it is cooked and you don’t want it spilling everywhere in the oven!
• Cover your creation with the crust and press the borders to seal the pie. Remove the excess.
• Brush the top of the pie with the egg white wash so it gets a nice browning after it cooks!
• Bake in the oven middle rack at 425ºF/220ºC for 25 minutes.
• Rotate the pie and reduce the heat to 350ºF/180ºC and bake for another 40 minutes. At the 30 minute mark, be careful not to burn the pie (remember that every oven is different!). You know it is ready when the crust is golden brown and you see the blueberry filling bubbling!
• When it is ready, take out of the oven and let it cool for at least 2 hours. This will allow the filling to set and allow the crust to be firm enough so it doesn’t break.
• Now it’s time to enjoy!!

The post Awesome Blueberry Pie appeared first on The Gluten-Free Corner.