I realize this is one of many recipes to come that is totally off season for most of my readers. Save it for early June and make me jealous around that time. Similarly, I had never associated Christmas with strawberries. When I bought some buckets a few weeks back, the lady warned me “you have to put in your orders for Christmas now!”.
The history: a few years back I noticed rhubarb being sold on the Freiburg market. I pulled out my “fruit” baking book and looked for rhubarb recipes. Ever since, I more or less continuously through the summer season bake this pie.
The funny anecdote: when I first baked it, it reminded me of my favourite childhood book series “Little House on the Prairie”: in one of the later books Laura has just gotten married and her first housewife’s task is to prepare dinner for a herd of hungry farmers who help her husband harvesting wheat. She bakes a rhubarb pie but forgets to put in sugar, and as the first farmer takes a bite he makes a funny remark and then pours sugar over the pie, and Laura feels silly and realizes how awful that first, sour, bite must have been. Imagine! So taken up by this memory, I forgot to add sugar as well!
The best compliment I’ve received for it so far: “That was spectacularly delicious”, followed a few days later by “mm, well, those strawberries from the supermarket aren’t bad, but what they lack is … the tartness of rhubarb and a nice crumbly pastry around it …”.
The latest occasions: Cake-club’s “Christmas bake-off challenge” and Ian’s “Christmas Carol night with pizzas”.
I’ll give the original recipe first, and then explain the Christmas bake-off challenge modifications.
Ingredients:
- 2 cups of flour
- Rind of 1 orange
- Pinch of salt
- 200g unsalted butter
- Some fluid, originally ice water, but things like orange juice or champagne also work well
- 1 cup sugar
- 2 tbs tapioca
- Pinch of salt
- Pinch of nutmeg
- 2 tsp corn starch
- 500 g chopped rhubarb
- 50 ml orange juice, or white wine
- 500g coarsely sliced strawberries
- Some flakes of butter
Dough: in bowl combine flour, orange rind and salt, cut butter in small pieces and cut through flour with 2 knifes. With a cold hand knead, add fluid as needed for all to stick together. Then put in fridge in plastic wrap.
Combine rhubarb, sugar (!!! I usually use less than the 1 cup, because I like it to be a bit sour still, but it is usually pretty sour like that), tapioca and corn starch (I sometimes omit those, you will have a juicy pie then), salt, nutmeg and the orange juice/wine.
Roll out 2 thirds of the dough on a floured surface and put it in a greased 20 cm springform. Fill it with rhubarb and the strawberries on top.
These photos are still from in Freiburg, when I originally planned to post the recipe, 2 years ago or so... I brought that springform with me to NZ. Life is all about priorities
Roll out the remaining dough as well and cut out (heart) forms, or alternatively cut into strips and criss-cross them over the pie. Put some butter flakes on top.
Bake 15 minutes at 220C (preheated), and then about 30 minutes more at 180C, until pastry is golden and filling bubbly. Let cool slightly before serving. Although I’ve never done this yet, I am sure it is even heavenlier with vanilla ice cream while it is still warm… mmmm….
The Christmas bake-off challenge asked us to “bake according to an invented or existing modified recipe, basic chemistry allowed”. I first applied basic mathematics and instead of 1 big pie, made several smaller tarts. Realizing that the baking time would be less, and the rhubarb thus less well cooked, I decided to first lightly boil the rhubarb in Thomas’ favourite red wine (“I don’t think that wine is for cooking, actually, dear”). That in itself was very successful and I cooked all the remaining rhubarb with wine and sugar and preserved it. While doing so I also realized this was already beyond basic chemistry, as I was boiling together intricate and complex molecules: oxalic acid of the rhubarb and tannins from the wine. Both substances play a role in my research, how is that for multidisciplinary baking.
Everything else was according to recipe: rolled out the dough and lined approximately 20 muffin forms with them (difficult), added the mushy rhubarb (it was a little too mushy), the strawberries, topped it off another piece of dough (heart shaped)and baked it basically as long as I would have the full pie. But: I also soaked large strawberry halves in my favourite white wine overnight, and decorated the tarts with those in the morning.
The polls for favourite Christmas challenge cakes are still running (we have 4 cakes each week!), and in fact I hope I won’t win the first round, as I will have to bake another difficult cake then in the finals., and I won’t really have time for that the next 4 months or so, sadly. The tarts are really neat and definitely easier to serve than slices of the big, juicy, pie, but it also takes unreasonably more time to make them.
