A delicious summer pie: strawberry basil pie with balsamic vinegar!
It’s farm share season again, and so it’s time once again here in New England to grab all the best of the seasonal fruits and vegetables as they come. corwin recently called to say he was coming home with several quarts of the first strawberries of the year and so he thought I should make a pie. (It was my night to cook.) So before he got home I whipped up a batch of pie crust (I used the all-butter, food-processor variation of Flaky Pastry Dough from the 1990s edition of The Joy of Cooking and I added a bunch of fresh grated nutmeg to the dough) and then started looking at recipes.
The “problem” with plain strawberry pie is that it can actually come out too sweet and too homogenous. Some solve this by doing strawberry rhubarb, but we didn’t have rhubarb. Some suggest upping the acid content with more lemon juice, but you still have relentless strawberry, then. The nutmeg in the crust was going to help a little, as was the fact that I was going to do a lattice top, which gives the pie a little more toothsome bite, but how to add complexity and body to the flavor?
And then I realized I was staring at a small basil plant that has been growing on the kitchen counter for about two months now….
Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.