Third Time’s a Charm?: Spiced Blueberry Pie

Making the blueberry pie for the Summer Lawn Party turned into quite the pie adventure.  As promised, here is the recipe and the experience my daughter and I had troubleshooting it.

Round One

We followed the recipe exactly, using frozen blueberries as suggested. Here are the ingredients.

Pastry for a two crust pie

3 c frozen or canned blueberries

1 tbsp flour

1 c brown sugar

1 tbsp butter

1/4 tsp ground cloves

 

We thawed the blueberries to try to keep the pie from being too watery. We lined the pie with dough for one crust, and put the berries into the pie. We sprinkled the pie with the flour and brown sugar, then dotted it with butter. We then dusted the cloves over the top of the brown sugar. We cut a few slits in the top crust and placed it on the pie. We baked it for 15 minutes at 450 degrees, then reduced the temperature to 350 degrees and baked for another 30 minutes.

The pie turned out incredibly runny. It had a really nice spicy- sweet layer right below the crust from the brown sugar, cloves, and butter. We definitely needed bowls when we ate this. It was a nice balance of sweet and a bit tart. The textures of the crust, blueberries, and the brown sugar layer complimented each other well. We finally decided to use the pie as an ice cream topping, and try the recipe again with some adjustments to the ingredients.

Round Two

For the second version, we used fresh blueberries and changed or added the following ingredients.

1 tbsp cornstarch

2 tbsp flour

4 tbsp butter

We mixed the flour and cornstarch into the blueberries, but kept the rest of the recipe the same. The resulting pie was still runny, but not quite as watery as the first pie. It still had a nice layer of the sweet brown sugar mixture, and was ultimately used for ice cream topping again due to the consistency of the filling.

Round Three

For our final pie, we purchased cans of blueberry pie filling. Everything else in the recipe was the same. We had hoped the canned filling would help thicken the consistency of the blueberries, but the third pie also suffered from the same watery filling.

Results

The pies were delicious. Despite the runny filling, the flavor was just right. The winning part of this recipe is the brown sugar and clove topping right beneath the top crust. Adding this pie to ice cream was a big hit. We used both a vanilla and a blackberry ice cream. It made a perfect summer dessert. Even my one year old wanted more, so I count it as a success. I’d make this again just to use it for a topping. It definitely didn’t work as a pie for us.

Do you have suggestions on how to thicken the filling? We’d love to hear them and would try this recipe again to test them.