Pie in a Jar-O

Matt, full of awesome ideas as usual, found an awesome recipe for pie. But not just any pie... Single-serving pies baked into their very own squat little mason jar! What could be better?


Here is the inspiration.


We modified the recipe a bit based upon some tips for pie-crust making from other recipe books (specifically, How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman). Unfortunately, we still ended up with chewy, tough crust, but I'll get to that later.


PART I: THE INGREDIENTS
Short, squat 1/2 pint mason jars

Pie crust:
1 1/4 cups flour
4 tbsp butter, 4 tbsp shortening
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
ice water


Filling:
2 cups canned cherries or diced apples
2 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp flour
Other spices - For the cherry pies, we used lemon zest, for the apple pie, we used cinnamon.
1 tbsp butter (divided between the pies)


Note: As I write this I realize I never added this last ingredient - the butter. I wonder how much of a difference it made? The filling was still very tasty without the extra fat.


Crumble topping:
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup flour
2 tbsp oats
1/4 tbsp cinnamon
3 tbsp cold butter






The first part was easy - Just mix the dry ingredients, cut up the butter into bits, and slowly cut the butter in. According to the recipe, the goal is to have lots of little tiny bits of butter coated with flour. 

The hard part was the next step - slowly folding in cold ice water until the mixture becomes solid enough to stick together. The recipe calls for only about 3 tbsp to 1/4 cup water. I think we used at least 1/2 a cup before it appeared to get to an appropriate texture, and at that point it was quite doughy. This was probably our first mistake when it came to the crust.

The second mistake was working the dough too much with our hands as we coated the inside of the mason jars. The dough became somewhat oily, which I think you are supposed to avoid when trying to make good dough. 

PART III: THE FILLING

We didn't have enough cherry filling to make all four pies, so we improvised with an apple pie. We happened to have a golden delicious apple handy, so that got cut up and placed in the last jar with more flour/sugar, etc. This step is pretty much the easiest part of the whole process. Mix the ingredients and place in the jars. We decided to add lemon zest to the cherry filling, just to give it a little bite.

Matt made the crumble topping, which also looked fairly easy, although I didn't have much to do with this step because I was busy with the filling.

Part IV: BAKE IT


Bake the filled jars for 50 minutes. Yes, you can bake mason jars. No, they won't explode.

The result.


The apple pie ended up being much tastier than the cherry pie, although both were excellent. The dough was too chewy and not flaky at all. Matt didn't like the crumble topping with the cherry pie, but I thought it was great. To each his own.


Pros: Despite the crust, the outcome was adorable and delicious. Once we get the recipe down, I think they will make great gifts! Also not too expensive and fairly easy to make.


Cons: The crust. How can we fix this? Any suggestions? Less water? Roll the dough out before putting it in the jars? More butter?


-rachel

Ps. Here's how we rewarded ourselves for all our hard work:

And, eventually...