Recipe: Triple Berry Pie

Several years ago, when I was visiting my friend Danielle in Wisconsin for the 4th of July, we made a berry pie* that was so good. So now I always associate berry pie with the holiday. BJ's had a good deal on berries, so I bought a bunch; I quickly found this recipe from the Tastes Better from Scratch blog and then got to work.

Ingredients

• Homemade pie crust for a 9'' deep dish pan (you need 2 crusts for this recipe: one for the bottom and one for the top)
• 7 cups fresh or frozen raspberries, blueberries and blackberries, about 2 ⅓ cups of each type
• 1 cup granulated sugar (plus a little extra to sprinkle on top of the pie)
• 1 Tablespoon lemon juice
• 4 Tablespoons cornstarch
• 2 Tablespoons butter
• 1 large egg white, beaten with a fork

Directions

1. Cook berries: Add berries, sugar and lemon juice to a large saucepan over medium heat.

Berries with sugar and lemon juice in a pan. Step #1 complete!

2. Simmer, until warm and juicy, about 5-10 minutes, gently stirring occasionally. (You can taste it at this point and see if it's sweet enough for your liking. If you want it sweeter, you can add ¼ cup more sugar.)

3. Thicken filling: Spoon out about ½ cup of the juice from the pan into a bowl. Stir cornstarch into the juice until smooth.

4. Bring pot of berries back to a simmer and slowly pour in the cornstarch. Gently stir mixture (being careful not to mash the berries), until thickened, about 2-5 minutes.

All cooked up! Started to taste like jam at this point.

5. Cool and add to pie shell. Remove from heat and stir in the butter. Allow to cool for 15 minutes. Pour mixture into unbaked pie shell (in a 9-inch deep dish pan).

6. Add lattice top or a whole top with holes pricked on top for steam to escape.

7. Pinch the edges of the top and bottom pie crusts together and crimp the edge, if you like. Brush a thin layer of beaten egg white over the top of the pie and sprinkle lightly with sugar. 

8. Bake at 400°F for 40-45 minutes. Check it after about 25 minutes and place a piece of tinfoil over it if the top crust is getting too brown.

9. Remove to a wire cooling rack and allow to cool for several hours. Once cooled completely, you can cut into it or cover it and refrigerate it overnight to serve the next day.

First of all, I find it very strange that the recipe's first step is not to preheat the oven. That's Baking 101! But I digress. Let's start with the ingredients. You know I'm not going to make my own pie crust; ain't nobody got time for that, and Aldi sells them in a two-pack, so voilà. And I just beat the whole egg together rather than separate the yolk from the white. Then I could microwave the remaining egg and have a scrambled egg for the next day's breakfast!

The rest of the directions are pretty straight forward. I did pour the juice into the corn starch as opposed to the other way around, but I think that was okay. I also might have baked the berries into their jammy filling a little too long; the filling barely filled the pie plate! I used my Williams Sonoma pie crust mold for the first time for the lattice top. This part might work better with a homemade crust, or at least a thicker crust (as I pressed the pre-made dough into the mold, it was so thin that it started to tear in some places). Maybe next time I would fold the pie crust over to give it double-thickness. But it was still fun trying this tool for my pie's decorative top. I might not have crimped the edges enough (you can see the spillage in the top photo), but no biggie.

In the end, this pie tasted very good, but maybe next time I would not add blackberries. I like blackberries, don't get me wrong. But their seeds are a little crunchy, while the rest of the pie filling is very soft. So it's a bit jarring to be crunching on these tiny seeds while trying to enjoy the dessert. But otherwise, I would definitely make this recipe again!

*Here is the recipe for the "Fruit of the Forest" pie Danielle and I made. When looking for that recipe in my long list of blog posts, I also found this one; I forgot about adding chocolate into the pie! 🤤🤤🤤