BaltimOregon

Apple Blackberry (and Quince) Pie

Local quinces, including ones that are apparently edible raw.

This is a brilliant pie because it bridges the seasons, melding tart, jammy berries with crisp, fragrant apples. I also added quince slices to the mix, because the astringent fruit gains a wonderful rosey pear-like flavor when cooked with sugar. I’d never come across quinces before moving here to the Pacific Northwest, where we even haven them growing on the neighbor’s tree down the road. The USDA genebank here in Corvallis is home to North America’s perhaps most diverse quince collection.

Making and rolling out your own pie crust is always a patshkie, but at least this all-butter recipe made four discs, so we had two leftover to freeze. We also didn’t dock the dough (prick it with a fork) before pouring in the filling. The crust was flakey and delicious but not quite crisp enough. Maybe pre-bake it a bit first? This pie crust tutorial video helps you beef up your technique.

Fresh out of the oven.

The pie recipe comes from Rustic Fruit Desserts, published by Portland chef Cory Schreiber and Julie Richardson of the Baker & Spice Bakery there. Cory recommended the recipe when he came on our KBOO Food Show Wednesday. For our School Lunch Special, Schreiber also spoke about the challenges of his work as farm-to-school coordinator for the Oregon Department of Agriculture.

Alas, come dinnertime I couldn’t find my precious recipe for “Autumn Salad with Apples, Comte and Hazelnuts” that I had clipped from The Baltimore Sun. These scraps get lost in a move. So I tried to recreate the apple cider vinagrette anyway and did the rest from memory. I used spinach greens, substituted walnuts for hazelnuts and sliced up some celeriac (celery root) along with the celery hearts. The syrupy reduced apple cider in the dressing and tangy raw milk comte cheese really make for a memorable salad I’ll continue to make.

Googling around, I remembered the recipe came from Susan Spicer’s Crescent City Cooking book of New Orleans recipes. I finally found the recipe reprinted on a blog (see below).

Hey all you turophiles out there, any other ways you recommend using comte? This one for comte and pear phillo triangles looks intriguing. The cheese just pairs so well with any kind of fruit.

Autumn Salad with Apples, Comte, and Hazelnuts
Serves 4

8 cups mixed greens, cleaned
1 medium apple, thinly sliced into matchsticks
2-3 ounces Comte cheese, cut in matchsticks
1/4 cup sliced celery hearts
1 cup Cider Dressing, recipe follows
Salt
1/4 cup chopped toasted hazelnuts
1/4 cup dried cherries or cranberries, optional

In a large bowl, use your hands or two wooden spoons to toss together the lettuce, apple, cheese, and celery hearts. Drizzle in enough dressing to lightly coat the salad; reserve remaining dressing. Season the salad with a little salt, if necessary, and divide among four plates. Sprinkle salad with hazelnuts and drizzle with equal portions of the remaining Cider Dressing.

Cider Dressing

1 cup apple cider
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1 tablespoon finely chopped shallots
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/2 cup pure olive oil or a mild vegetable oil
1 teaspoon hazelnut oil, optional
salt and pepper

Place the cider and vinegar in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer until reduced to 3 tablespoons of liquid. Pour it into a small bowl and add the shallots and mustard. Whisk to combine, then slowly whisk in the olive oil and the hazelnut oil, if using. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Our neighbor two houses down dropped off a gallon of home-pressed apple cider this afternoon, just because. He extracted the sweet juice from the fruit of his own overbearing tree. This same neighbor, who recently retired from Hewlett-Packard here, brought us a homemade blackberry cobbler when we moved in.

And the apples on the right are a rare Royal Gala/Fuji blend our other neighbors, both forestry folks, created from a graft on a tree in their yard. I used them to make an apple crisp. Those kind next-door neighbors have given us plums, tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers from their harvest. They also lent us tables, chairs and lamps so our house wouldn’t feel so barren before our furniture arrived. Corvallis people are rather generous and always willing to lend a hand.