Strawberry Pie

Today I wanted to share a new favorite recipe with you - Strawberry pie! As I mentioned before, my friend Seneca and I did a little baking on Saturday, and this is what we came up with. I don't really think of strawberries as making a great pie on their own, but this was amazing!

I've talked about Bountiful Baskets before, an co-op that I participate in to get fresh fruits & veggies from. A few months ago, I purchased the strawberry add-on special that consisted of 8 pounds of strawberries for $12. I chopped them all up and froze them, because I knew I could get a good use out of them, even if I only used them in smoothies. Fast forward to this weekend, our friends requested we make some sort of fruity dessert, so I grabbed one of my bags of strawberries and we searched the internet looking for something to try. Usually when I'm making a baked good using fruits, I stick with a turnover or cobbler-type dessert, but we decided to be adventurous and try out a strawberry pie - and the results were amazing!

To start off, we used the easiest pie crust recipe we could find. We had no idea how much dough it would produce, but we had all the ingredients and so we went for it.

Pie crust:

1 ¼ cups all-purpose flour

¼ tsp salt

½ cup butter, diced

¼ cup water

We whisked the first 3 ingredients together until it was a crumbly mixture, then added the water slowly while mixing. We played around with it a bit before rolling it into a ball, wrapping it with cling wrap, then putting it in the freezer for about 20 minutes.

Strawberry filling:

4-6 cups strawberries (it was difficult to tell how many because they were frozen!)

1 cup white sugar

⅓ cup all-purpose flour

While that was baking, we pulled the strawberries out of the freezer and put them in a skillet. It was maybe about 6 cups of strawberries - it seemed like a lot, but once they had defrosted and softened in the skillet it was closer to 4 cups. We added 1 cup of sugar to the skillet and stirred that in with the strawberries, then periodically as they continued to defrost. We left it on for about 20 minutes. After they were no longer frozen, we removed the strawberries to a mixing bowl and added the flour. The wonderful thing about using these frozen strawberries is that they left a LOT of sweet strawberry syrup behind - we put that in a jar and refrigerated it for later. 

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. We used a 9" cake pan (only because we didn't have a pie tin on hand!) we rolled out the dough and put it in, and we trimmed it down so that the edges went all the way up the side of the pan. We poured in the strawberry mixture and used the leftover dough to make a lattice on the top - we ended up having just enough dough to make it look pretty, and for it being our first time making a lattice, it turned out beautifully! We baked it at 425 for 35 minutes. 

After letting it cool, we served it with ice cream on the side, and some of the strawberry sauce poured on top. Everyone agreed that it was amazing, and there really isn't anything I would do differently!