It’s the peak of summer, the time of year for barbeques, picnics, and running through the sprinkler. It’s also the perfect time of year to enjoy tomatoes, berries, and peaches, so to celebrate my return to my Minnesota home, I recruited my sisters Colleen and Stephanie and my niece Lucy to bake a summertime peach pie.
To begin, we made the crust:
1 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
¼ tsp kosher salt
1 stick cold butter, cut into cubes
¼ cup ice water
This is a basic pie crust recipe, and is proportioned for the bottom shell only. We mixed the flour and salt in a large mixing bowl. Using a pastry blender, we cut the butter into the flour mixture until the butter cubes were the size of small peas. Then we sprinkled in the water one teaspoon at a time, until the mixture began to form loose clumps and just barely held together.
Then we turned the clumpy mixture onto a floured surface, formed it into a ball, wrapped it in plastic, and chilled it for 30 minutes. On a floured surface, we rolled the chilled dough into a circle and transferred it to the 9” pie dish (there are a couple of different methods for doing this, my favorite is folding the circle onto itself once, then again – so the dough is in the shape of a triangle – and then position it in the pie dish, unfold and ‘ta-da!’ The dough is centered and untorn.) Then the edges were trimmed and the crust pinched into the classic pie crust edge shape.
The crust is all ready, so now to make the filling and the topping.
List of Ingredients
Crumble topping:
1 stick butter, softened
¼ cup granulated sugar
¼ tsp vanilla extract
¼ tsp almond extract
1/8 tsp kosher salt
1 cup all purpose flour
¼ cup almond meal
¼ cup sliced almonds
1 tbs turbinado sugar (Sugar in the Raw)
Fruit Filling:
8 large peaches, sliced
1tbs chopped crystallized sugar
¼ cup packed brown sugar
1 tbs cornstarch
These peaches are perfect! So juicy they were difficult to slice, but we did, and a many slices were ‘sampled’ before making it into the pie. We sliced the peaches with the skin on. It’s your preference; however I like the color of the skin in the baked pie. The sliced peaches were mixed in a large bowl with the chopped ginger, brown sugar, and cornstarch, and then poured into the pie shell.
The crumble topping is made by mixing all of the ingredients listed (minus the turbinado sugar) in a bowl. Using an electric hand mixer, the butter will incorporate into all the dry ingredients and form crumbles. This recipe calls for almonds, however there is a nut allergy in my family, so we omitted them.
Now we sprinkle on the turbinado sugar, for added crunch. The pie is ready for the preheated 375-degree oven. Bake for an hour, until the topping is browned and the juices are bubbling.
The pie can be served warm or room temperature. We ate ours before attending an outdoor concert, another summertime treat. It was so juicy and sweet, in fact it was a bit too juicy, but there were no complaints.
