How to Make Juiciest Blueberry Pie

My parents are here spending a couple weeks at their summer house before they head back to Missouri.  My mother made a roast and mashed potatoes and salad and key lime pie for Sunday dinner. I surprised them with a blueberry pie. Here is the unbaked pie. See how sort of nice it looks?

Here’s the pie after it was baked an hour and juiced all over itself.

Was it my best pie ever? No. But it was good and really juicy. My dad says it doesn’t need to be so thick. His Grammy Ball who built our family camp on Toddy Pond with her Boston Symphony trumpet musician husband apparently made the best blueberry pies ever and hers weren’t very thick. So I’ll have to keep exploring recipes. I myself like a blueberry pie overflowing with blueberries. I don’t think this pie had enough blueberries. But, to each his own.

No matter how many blueberries you put in a pie, you must try to get wild Maine blueberries, which are really tiny and sweet. Outside of New England, I think you can buy frozen Maine blueberries pretty easily at Whole Foods and at Sam’s Club.

My recipe for juiciest, blueberry pie is inspired from one by Williams-Sonoma.

Quickest, Juiciest Blueberry Pie

Print

Ingredients

• 2 rounds of pie dough, to fit a 9-inch pie plate
• 4 cups blueberries, Maine if you can get them
• 1 Tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 3 Tbsp cornstarch
• 1/2 tsp lemon zest
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• sanding sugar for top crust
• egg white wash for crust

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees
2. Roll out one round of pie dough and place in pie plate.
3. Mix blueberries, lemon juice, sugar, cornstarch, lemon zest, salt and cinnamon in a large bowl.
4. Pour gently into bottom crust.
5. Place second pie crust over the filling, crimping the sides against the pie plate.
6. Brush egg white wash over the top crust and sprinkle with sanding sugar.
7. Bake for 60 to 75 minutes.
8. Let cool for one to two hours.
9. Serve with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

Sometimes I worry that pie is going to go the way of the dinosaur. Really, more of us should be baking pie, even with pie crust made from scratch. Once you’ve made the crust, which takes just a couple minutes if you use a food processor like I do, pie isn’t very labor intensive.  I tossed together the blueberry pie filling in less than five minutes, that includes time to zest a lemon.

Do you have a favorite blueberry pie recipe? I’d love to see it. Tell me about it in the comments. What about blueberry gathering? Have you ever raked berries?  I’ve never raked berries. I understand it’s incredibly hard, back-breaking work. I remember one casual blueberry gathering outing somewhere near Toddy Pond with my grandfather when I was little. There was a metal tin pail involved, I remember that, but no rakes. At least I wasn’t using one. Maybe he was?