Choosing sides
and a recipe for the best strawberry-rhubarb pie
Are you a baker or a cook?
If your happy place is in the kitchen, it’s likely you have a preference for one or the other. And it’s not necessarily about whether you have a sweet tooth or not.
Nor is it about having fancy tools; equipment is only one part of the equation. Of course the very best of knives, a top drawer oven, a high speed food processor make light work of cooking or baking. But give an experienced cook a source of heat, a cutting utensil, and the raw ingredients of a dish, and magic can happen.
Like every other craft, mastery comes with practice, trial and error, willing volunteers to sample the hits and misses, creativity and perhaps most of all, imagination. It’s what the cook brings into the kitchen that counts, whether you’re making a boeuf bourguignon or a carrot cake.
A culinary journey
When we started our married life, and I really got down to cooking, our modest apartment had the tiniest of kitchens. In a previous life, it may well have been a broom closet. Forget fancy gadgets, high-end appliances, or storage space. I had room for a set of Lagoustina pots and pans and that’s about all.
It didn’t stop us from becoming dinner party enthusiasts. The electric stove with finicky coils, the dollhouse-sized oven, the refrigerator with barely enough room in the freezer for ice, let alone food…I took them in stride.
And with those first culinary steps, I determined that baking just wasn’t for me. With little room to spare, the precise exactitude of baking didn’t suit my creative mind. I wanted to season with abandon, make substitutions at will, play with proportions and ingredients. With its scientific bent, baking felt too restrictive for my developing skills.
It turned out that in kitchen, I was more improvisational jazz singer, less classically trained soprano.
Styles that make your food sing
Have you seen Dianne Reeves perform? That smooth as silk contralto voice: deep, rich, true. The pure artistry of her styling. And, when you least expect it, breathtaking virtuosity and improvisational prowess in the form of scat singing: a song that improvises melodies and rhythms using the voice as an instrument rather than a speaking medium.
It’s my kind of music and my kind of cooking style, or at least I thought so until we finally created the kitchen of my dreams.
With counters for miles, not one, but two ovens that actually worked well and even more room for my imagination, I began to stretch further afield. And from the minute I made my first loaf of bread, I realized that baking and I could be fast friends. It was easy to graduate from a simple loaf to breads of all kinds: focaccia, banana, zucchini.
But it was Julia Child’s tarte tatin that cemented my love of baking. With a foolproof, easy to make dough and rustic shape that was the furthest from fussy, this became my new go-to. If tarte tatin, then why not pie?
I’m a cheese over chocolate kind of gal, but if there’s pie on the menu. count me in. With pie, I can combine the best of both worlds: the precision of making a really good dough with the latitude to play around with the filling. There’s still some foundational baking principles to follow, to be sure, but pie - homey, familiar, welcoming as a warm hug - forgives you for improvisation.
I learned that when I made my first peach pie. I wanted to play around with the flavour profile, and added some ginger into the mix. It made the pie, and my heart, sing.
Don’t ever ask me what my favourite dish is, or what my last meal might be. When it comes to food, I can’t choose amongst so many things I love. And when it comes to choosing either cooking or baking, I know without a doubt what my answer would be. I choose both.
Strawberry-rhubarb pie
from Art of the Pie, Kate McDermott
While cherry pie holds a special place in my heart, strawberry-rhubarb has a fighting chance for first place. That’s especially true when it’s Kate McDermott’s strawberry-rhubarb pie. Heavy on the rhubarb, light on sugar, with just a tiny bit of the most essential flavours - lemon, nutmeg - it’s the perfect early summer dessert.
Pie is McDermott’s passion and she is generous with her love for this most delicious of treats, whether sweet or savoury. Head over to Pie Cottage virtually through her website, take an online class, or if you’re really lucky, go to Pie Cottage in person and learn from the hands of a pie queen. That’s an experience that’s on my bucket list for sure.
Note: The recipe doesn’t specify the exact amount of rhubarb or strawberries - it’s more about getting the right amount of fruit to fit your pie dish. McDermott recommends treating frozen fruit just exactly the same as fresh, so don’t overfill your pie pan. Stay about ½ inch below the rim with the filling, and don’t thaw the fruit.
Ingredients
1 double crust Art of the Pie® dough recipe
Rhubarb, fresh or unthawed frozen, cut into 1-inch chunks
Strawberries fresh or unthawed frozen, large berries cut in half
1 cup of sugar for a 9-inch deep dish pie pan; adjust up or down if you are using a larger or smaller pie pan
A small squeeze of lemon
½ teaspoon salt
a pinch or grating of fresh nutmeg
2 tablespoons quick cooking tapioca
¼ cup flour
1 egg white + 1 tablespoon water mixed together
extra sugar for sprinkling
In your pie pan, mix 1 part strawberries and 2 parts rhubarb together so that it comes to about ½ inch below the top of the pie pan.
Pour the fruit in to a medium sized bowl. Rinse and wipe dry the pie pan and set in the fridge to chill the pan.
Squeeze a small squirt of lemon on the fruit. In a small bowl, whisk together the tapioca, flour, salt, sugar and nutmeg and sprinkle over the fruit. Toss to combine and finish mixing the fruit with a spoon until it is coated.
Roll out the bottom dough and place it in the pie pan.
Spoon in the fruit filling.
Roll out the upper crust and place it on top of the fruit filling. See Kate’s video on how to make a lattice crust here.
Crimp the edges and with a knife; cut some vents on top.
With a pastry brush, lightly spread over some of the egg white wash. Sprinkle evenly with about 2 teaspoons of sugar.
Place in a preheated 425F oven for 20 minutes, turn oven down to 375F and bake for an additional 40 minutes.
Couldn’t agree more baker AND cook!
I'm definitely not a baker, more of a cook but I definitely dabble in pie! This one looks fab