the perfect pie is a tart

Easter dinner was about as traditional as you can get.  A glazed ham (glazed with orange marmalade, bourbon, and mustard), potatoes au gratin, asparagus with lemon and shallots, and a black raspberry tart.  I won't bore you with pics of the traditional stuff, but I do have to post about the tart, because it turned out so well.  As a young friend once declared, upon eating this tart, "Jesus would eat this pie!"  Ever since, among a small group of friends, it has been known as Jesus's pie.  Well, Jesus would have been very happy with his resurrection day pie, because it was delicious.  And, oh so simple.  The crust is a combination of a small packet of cream cheese, 3/4 of a stick of butter, two tablespoons of lard, a teaspoon of salt, 2 tablespoons of sugar, and one and a half cups of flour, mixed up in a food processor with just enough cold water to make it come together as a dough.  Yes.  Lard.  But I can get the non-hydrogenated stuff.  If I couldn't, I would just use the cream cheese and a full stick of butter.

What makes this tart so fun is the ease of putting it together.  The dough, rested in the fridge for a couple of hours, is simply rolled out like a big pizza crust.  The berries, straight from the freezer, get mixed with a bit of quick-cooking tapioca, the zest and juice of a lemon, and about 4 tablespoons of sugar.  I use much less sugar than what is called for in most pie recipes, so the berry flavor can really shine through. 

That gets piled into the middle of the crust, dotted with a little butter, and baked at 400 degrees for about 40 minutes, or until the crust is golden and the berries are bubbling.

the crust was brown, crisp, and delicious

Once the berry mixture is piled in the middle of the crust, the edges are simply folded over and crimped into place.  An extra step, not necessary, but resulting in a really brown and crispy crust, is to brush the crust with an egg white beaten with a tiny bit of water, and sprinkled with sugar.  I bake the tart on parchment paper, which makes cleanup a snap.

The one thing I would do differently next time, would be to bloom (let it hydrate and soften) the tapioca in a little bit of hot water.  Some of it did not dissolve during baking.  But the flavors were out of this world, and the production much less fussy than making a traditional pie.  Happy Easter!