Now, here's a timely recipe to try out my One Pie Dough to Rule Them All recipe I gave you last night.  Try it before the fleeting cherry season is over.  Do try, even if you're one of those who couldn't stand the generic, gloopy cherry pie - I'm looking at you Matt.  Because this recipe, this ain't your usual, generic cherry pie.  It might even be the best cherry pie you'll ever tasted.  You try it and tell me.

The secret to this pie is the spices.  When I was tinkering with my cherry pie recipe, I thought adding some spices to it would be fun.  So I went to my spice rack and found a blend that I made for my French spiced bread, Pain d'Epices.  It's got the usual cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove, but also with a generous amount of ginger powder, giving it an interesting, unusual character.  It turned out beautifully in the first cherry pie I baked for the season.  Now I won't ever bake my cherry pie without it again.

Spiced Cherry Pie

1 recipe One Pie Dough to Rule Them All (Or use your favorite pie dough, even a store-bought one if you must)
2 lbs | just under 1 kg sweet cherries (Bing or similar varieties)
1 cup | 200 g granulated sugar
3/4 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger powder
1/4 tsp nutmeg
a pinch of clove
3 tbsp cornstarch or ClearJel
juice from 1 large or 2 small lemons
1 beaten egg blended with a bit of water to make an eggwash
demerara sugar (or other large-grain sugar) to sprinkle on top

You will also need a 9" pie plate.  I heartily recommend using a simple glass pie plate for this.  Glass pie plates bake up the best and most crisp pie crust, and you can see how the bottom crust is doing so there's no guess work involved.  

Note: This recipe uses regular sweet cherries, since sour cherries have been such a pain to find this season.  If you're one of those lucky souls with ample supply of sour cherries (p.s. I hate you) you can adapt it by omitting the lemon juice.  

Preheat the oven to 400F | 200C. 

Roll out your pie dough into 2 rounds, each just slightly larger than the pie plate.  (If you're working in a hot kitchen - looking at you New Yorkers - put the rolled-out dough rounds in between sheets of plastic or parchment on a cookie sheet and refrigerate while you deal with the cherries.)  

Pit the cherries, discard the pits and keep the cherries in a large bowl.  I find one of these cherry pitters indispensible, but if you don't have it you can just cut the cherries in half and remove the pits.  

In a separate bowl, measure the sugar, spices, and cornstarch (or ClearJel) into it.  Stir well with a fork to thoroughly blend the dry ingredients together, then pour it into the bowl over the pitted cherries.  Add the lemon juice and toss to blend and coat all the cherries with the sugar and the lemon juice.  (Your bare hands are the best tool for this step.)

Line the bottom crust on the pie plate.  Don't press the dough into the plate, you'll stretch it out and it will shrink up too much during baking.  Pick up the edge of the dough and push it down into the plate.  Pat it down thoroughly to smooth the dough out.   

Pour the cherry filling into the lined pie plate.  Spread it around the even out.  Brush the eggwash around the edge of the bottom crust to help seal the top and bottom crusts.  Cover with the top crust, pressing down the edges to help seal.  With a sharp knife or kitchen sheers, cut the excess dough around the edges of the pie plate.  Then, using the tines of a fork, press down the edges to make a pretty pattern, or crimp the edges if you want.  Cut a few slits over the top to vent the pie during baking.  

You can also make a lattice top with this dough.  Cut the dough round intended for the top crust into 10-12 strips.  Place four across the top of the pie, then weave in the other four to make a woven lattice top.  There's no special instruction for this.  If you're using my One Pie Dough to Rule Them All you won't have any problem with it.  The dough strips will be so sturdy you can practically knit with them.  If you're using other wimpy pie dough, you're on your own.  Heh.

Brush the top of the pie with the eggwash, sprinkle generously with demerara sugar.  

Bake in the preheated oven for about 45 minutes to just under an hour, until the crust is thoroughly golden brown on the top and bottom.  (I like to put the pie not on the middle rack but one just below it to help brown the bottom crust.)  You'll know it's completely done when the juice bubbles up through the slits on the top crust.  If the top crust turns golden brown before the bottom crust, you can cover the top completely with aluminum foil, or move your pie down closer to the bottom of the oven.  

Let the pie cool through, at least 3-4 hours, before cutting.  Now, if you used the cornstarch this pie will be a bit loose.  The ClearJel will help it set better than other starch.  But it will taste delicious either way.  

If you want to go totally over the top on this, make my Brown Butter Ice Cream and serve the pie with it à la mode!

Is it hubris to call this a perfect pie dough recipe?  Well, it is perfect.  And do you know what's perfect about it?  You can do it too.  Yes, YOU.  I don't care what kind of sordid, tragic past you've had with other pie dough recipes.  You can forget it all and start anew with this one.  It will become your One Pie Dough to Rule Them All: pies, tarts, galettes, pop-tarts, you name it.  It will be the easiest and most forgiving dough you've ever handled.  It will be flaky and tender, yet somehow possess the strength of character not to crumble under pressure like other wimpy doughs.  Your slice of pie or galette will stay beautifully in tact to serve, only to surrender into tender, flaky, buttery, delicious crumbs as you bite into it.

Forget all the pernickety details everyone tells you about how to make a pie dough.  You won't need to keep all the ingredients at precisely five degrees below zero.  You need not coddle it like a new born kitten.  You'll put on your fiercest dominatrix attitude and you shall beat this dough into submission.  And, yes, it will like it too.

No, there's no secret ingredient: no vinegar, no shot of vodka (but for, perhaps, a celebratory one at the end).  There's nothing here out of the ordinary.  There will be three ingredients: salted butter (yes you read that right, SALTED butter), plain all-purpose flour, and a little bit of water.  That's it.  The recipe is so easy, do it twice and you'll remember it by heart.  You'll do it in the summer.  You'll do it in the winter.  You'll do it for something sweet.  You'll do it for something savory.  Heck, you'll do it just for the fun of it.

Besides the ingredients, you'll need a clean pastry board, or a clean countertop.  We won't be doing this dough in a fancy food processor.  All you need - this part is very important - will be a pastry scraper and a pastry brush.  If you don't have them, go buy them now.  You'll pay about $10 for both items, and it will be the best $10 you've ever spent.

Are you ready?  Get the ingredients ready first.

for flaky pastry dough (enough for two 9" rounds, for top and bottom pie crust, or two tarts)

250 g | 2 1/4 cup plain all purpose flour

225 g | 8oz cold SALTED butter

60 ml | 1/4 cup water

Measure the flour and dump it unceremoniously onto your pastry board or clean countertop.  Cut all the butter into large chunks, like in the picture, and lay all the pieces on top of your pile of flour.  Flip each butter chunks once so the top sides are coated with flour.  (Before you proceed, if you hands tend to be warm, rinse your hands quickly under cold water and dry them well.)

Now, press the butter into the flour with the heal of your hand: the left one if you're a righty, and vice versa.  With your right hand holding the pastry scraper, scrape up some of the flour and butter and flip it over the pile.  Keep pressing and scraping until the butter becomes thin flakes pressed into the flour.  Keep working until you see more butter flakes than loose flour.  If your butter flakes are really big, break them up a little bit, you should end up with a combination of big flakes and some crumbs.

 Make a well in the middle of the pile, pour the 60ml or 1/4 cup of water into it.  Now, work very quickly, use your finger tips to gently blend and distribute the water evenly into the dough.  Then, scrape up the dough again with the pastry scraper and fold it again over itself.  Do this until you have a somewhat cohesive lump of dough.  Gather it into a ball, and wrap tightly with plastic and let rest in the fridge for about 30 minutes or until cold.

After 30 minutes, remove the dough from the fridge and unwrap it.  Flour the pastry board or counter very liberally.  (I know most pie dough recipes caution you from using too much flour, claiming that it will toughen the dough.  You don't have to worry about it here, I promise you.  Use enough flour so that the dough doesn't stick to your board or your rolling pin.)  Place the dough on the board and flour the top of the dough liberally as well.  With a rolling pin, roll the dough out to an elongated rectangle.  Pick up the pastry brush, brush off the excess flour from the top of the dough.  Then pick up one end of the rectangle, fold it 2/3 of the way in.  Brush the flour off the newly folded section, then pick up the other end and fold it over that section. Now you have a dough that is folded neatly into thirds.  The dough will crack and might even break, don't worry about it.  Just make sure you brush off as much flour as you can between the folding so you don't trap more flour in the dough than necessary.

Sprinkle more flour over everything.  Turn the folded dough 90 degree so that the seams are now on the sides, roll the dough out again into a rectangle, and repeat the brushing and folding again.  You will see that the dough will become smoother and more pliable.  You can repeat this process once or twice more - I usually do it three times altogether.  If your kitchen is very hot, and the dough seems very soft and gets a little oily, wrap it up with plastic and refrigerate until cold before you roll it out again.

What you're doing here with the rolling and folding is working the dough a little bit to build the strength so that it is not so fragile when you roll it out later.  (Especially if you're going to make lattice top, you'll find this dough a dream to work with.)  You're also creating very thin layers or butter and flour, much like in puff pastry, so the dough becomes extremely flaky once baked.  

When you've had enough of rolling and folding, roll the dough out one last time to a smaller rectangle, about the right size so that when you cut it in half you get two square-shaped doughs.  Then, reshape each into a rough circle, just push the corners in and work it until each dough is more or less round.  Don't worry, you can't over-work this dough.  Wrap each up in plastic and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes before you roll out into rounds for your pie.  

Once you are somewhat adept at this dough making process - having done it twice or three times should do really - you can double the recipe and have extra dough rounds ready for next time you feel like making a pie or a tart.  Tightly wrapped, the dough will keep in the fridge for a few days, and frozen for-practically-ever.  

When you're ready to make your pie, take the dough rounds from the fridge.  (If it's been there longer than 30 minutes you might need to let it warm up a bit to make it easier to roll.)  Roll each round into a circle that is 2-3" larger than your 9" pie plate.  Line the pie plate, fill with whatever fruits you're using, brush around the edges with some egg wash, then place the top dough over, pressing down to seal, and crimp the edges or pressing the tines of a fork around it to create a pretty pattern.  Cut a few slits to vent the pie before baking.  

Because there is no sugar at all in this dough, I like to brush the top (in case of a pie) or the edges (if it's an open faced tart) with egg wash to give it a little color.  I also like to sprinkle the top or the edges of my sweet pies or tarts with some sugar - large grains of sugar like demerara sugar do especially well here.

The pie you see in this picture above is my spiced cherry pie.  The recipe is coming up in the very next post.  This pie, if you will permit me to brag a bit, won first place at the pie contest at my friend Ali's July 4th party.  Here's a snapshot of a slice, you can see even from the darkish picture how flaky the dough is.

I also use this dough to make my fig tart, and my famous homemade poptarts.  This recipe was originally published in my book, The Foodie Handbook: the (almost) definitive guide to gastronomy.  Check it out for other awesome recipes and fun stories.

P.S. As a polite culinary thief, I am compelled tell you I got the idea for this recipe from the fabulous Zuni Cafe cookbook.  Almost by accident I discovered that I could use a lot less water in a pastry recipe (1/4 of the amount called for there), even simplify the process a bit, and still have a dough that's just as flaky and infinitely easier to work with.  So if you like this recipe, don't just thank me, thank Zuni's chef Judy Rodgers as well!

Here's an easy, delicious and totally adorable dessert to do this weekend, fromage blanc cheesecake, baked into cute little jars.  You can make it even more lovely by topping with roasted fruits, in this case I use tangy sweet nectarines scented with lemon verbena.  Nothing stops you from making this your own by using a combination of fruits, herbs, and even nuts of your choice.  What makes this cheesecake truly special, besides its oh-my-god-this-is-adorableness quality, is the luscious texture, like caressing you with satin, and the fact that you can make it by pretty much dumping all the ingredients in your food processor.

This is also a recipe that exemplifies my thieving ways as a cook.  I lift ideas, recipes, presentation tricks and others from cook books, kind friends, talented chefs I know, and restaurants I love, to mix, match, and generally muck with them until I come up with something I can roughly call my own.  I'm a polite thief, mind you, I always give credit to those I borrow from.  For this one, the fromage blanc cheesecake recipe is adapted from the one given to me by my friend Mark Denham, whose new restaurant Bishop cannot open fast enough for me.  (Later this year he said.)  The idea to serve it in a jar is shamelessly cribbed from another friend, the Manresa pastry chef Deanie Hickox.  Deanie has been doing a cheesecake-in-a-jar dessert for ages.  I adore the idea, but her recipe requires things that are not widely available for home cooks, so I adapted Mark's instead. 

So there, that's how this recipe came to be.  It might just be the summer dessert for me this year.  It can be made well in advance, and used as a blank canvas to play up a variety of poached/roasted/stewed fruits.  You can even top with store-bought preserves directly from the jar.  Fresh berries, perhaps macerated briefly with a bit of sugar, lemon juice, and/or liquor would do very well too.  Also good with this, my strawberries in hibiscus and vanilla syrup.

Fromage Blanc Cheesecakes baked in little jars, with lemon-verbena roasted nectarines
makes 8 servings in little 200 ml or 7 oz jars

Preheat the oven to 350F | 175C.

First you make the crumbs
1 stick | 120 g butter
7 oz | 200 g Graham crackers (about 12 pieces)
1/4 cup | 70 g brown sugar
a pinch of salt

Melt the butter in the microwave.  Roughly crumble the Graham crackers into the bowl of your food processor, add the sugar and the salt, process until they become fine crumbs.  Transfer the crumbs into a medium bowl, pour the melted butter over the crumbs, stir with a fork until the butter is evenly distributed.  

Use about 2 tablespoons of crumbs per jar, press down the loose crumbs until you have a somewhat packed crust on the bottom of the jars.  Wipe the side of the jars down if you've made a bit of a mess.  Set aside for the cheesecake batter. 

Spread the rest of the crumbs evenly on a pie plate or a small baking sheet.  Set aside for now. 

For the fromage blanc cheesecake batter
1 lbs cream cheese
8 oz | 225 ml fromage blanc (I use Cowgirl Creamery)
4 oz | 110 ml crème fraîche or sour cream (The only difference I can tell is about $5.  Be sure to use natural sour cream with no stabilizer or stuff you can't spell.)
1 cup | 200 g sugar 
juice from 1/2 lemon (reserve the other half for the fruits)
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
2 large eggs
1/4 cup | 30 g AP flour

Put all the ingredients except the flour in the bowl of your food processor.  (Just rinse and wipe it down after you've made the crumbs, no need to really wash it.)  Process until fully incorporated, wipe down the sides a couple times to make sure all the ingredients are completely blended.  Then, sprinkle the flour over the batter and process again until fully incorporated.  Depending on the brand and consistency of your ingredients, this batter may be loose enough to pour, or something more like the consistency of mayonnaise.  

If you don't have a food processor, or you got them guns like FLOTUS, go ahead and do it with a whisk and a mixing bowl.  I salute you.

Pour or spoon the batter into each jar, making sure to leave enough room  (1/2 inch or 1.25 cm) on the top so you can fill with the topping later.  Tap the jars on the counter (line it first with a tea towel so you don't chip your pretty jars or, worse yet, your expensive counter top), this will let out the air bubbles so your cheesecakes don't end up looking like the surface of the moon later.  Note: If you're using canning jars with an attached top, you might want to remove the top first so they're not so unwieldy in the oven.  A pair of pliers and a little dexterity should do the job just fine.

Place the filled jars in a deep roasting pan, carefully fill it with hot tap water until 2/3 way up the side of the shortest jar.  Set the oven racks to have one in the middle of the oven, and another just below it (with enough room to put your glass or ceramic baking dish.)  Lower the oven to 325F |160C.  Place the cheesecake pan on the top rack and bake for 40 minutes.  Place the pan with the excess crumbs on the lower rack and bake for 10 minutes to crisp up, meanwhile you can deal with the nectarines. 

Now the roasted nectarines
6-8 medium nectarines | about 800g
1/4 cup | 50 g sugar
1 tablespoon flour
juice from the other half of the lemon
7 leaves of lemon verbena (optional)

Cut up the nectarines into small wedges (about 8-10 pieces per fruit), put them on a pyrex glass or ceramic baking dish.  Add the sugar, flour, lemon juice, and crumple up the lemon verbena leaves over the fruit wedges.  Toss with your two hands until the fruit wedges are evenly coated.

After the crumb pan has been in the oven for 10 minutes, remove it from the oven, stir with a fork to loosen the crumbs, and set aside to cool.  Now place the fruit pan on the lower rack and bake until the cheesecakes are done.  

The cheesecakes should be ready right at the 40-minute mark.  Check about 5 minutes earlier if you're using smaller or thinner jars than you see in the picture here.  You'll know they're done when they look set on the outer edge, but the middle still jiggles and wobbles a bit.  Remove the roasting pan from the oven, then transfer the cheesecake jars to the counter to cool.  Let them cool completely to room temperature before serving.  They are also nice after they've chilled out a bit in the fridge (after first coming to room temperature on the counter.)  For the summer I think they're more refreshing when they're cold.  You can make the cheesecakes the day before and serve them the next day, they'll still be perfect.

Also remove the fruit pan from the oven.  You can tell it's ready when the fruits are cooked through and softened, but not completely mushy.  Stir gently with a wooden spoon, and let sit on the counter until cool completely.  Depending on how ripe your fruits, you might want to leave them in the oven for 5-10 minutes longer after the cheesecakes are done.  Remember to remove the lemon verbena leaves before serving.

To serve, divide the roasted fruits evenly among the jars.  If you're crumb-crazy like I am, then spoon a generous mound of crumbs on the side of each jar as well.  If not, you can sprinkle them lightly, then put the rest of the crumbs in a bowl and serve it along side the cheesecakes.  Your guests can top their own with as much crumbs as they'd like.

A note on the tools: you will need
8 jars, each about 7oz or 200ml.  Don't worry if you have a mish-mash of sizes, it won't make much of a difference.  These and these are similar to what I use, but any old jars or jam jars you have around should do fine.
1 deep roasting pan, big enough to fit all the little jars 
1 large glass or ceramic baking dish
1 pyrex pie dish or a small baking sheet

P.S. I know I haven't been posting much lately, but Chez Pim is in redesign, and will relaunch in a jiffy.  You'll like the new look and new offerings, I promise you.  Just check back often or follow me on twitter so you'll be the first to know when it happens.