Recipe: This is a real 'peach' of a pie
This is a really delicious pie, it is great as it is cooked in one go — no blind baking. And as peaches and nectarines are very plentiful at the moment, it’s a perfect choice for dessert. The three components are easy to do, starting with the crust and finishing with the crumble.
Pie crust
Ingredients
220gr flour
1 tbsp sugar
½ tsp salt
140gr very cold butter, diced
- Pour one cup of cold water into a bowl and add in a few ice cubes. Set aside.
- Mix together the flour, sugar and salt in the bowl of a food processor.
- Run the food processor and add the butter in pieces.
- Pulse to combine the flour mixture and butter pieces until the butter is broken up into pea-sized pieces. DO NOT OVERMIX!
- Add one or 2 tbsp of ice-cold water to just bring the dough together, knead gently on a floured worktop, flatten into a disk shape, wrap and chill for an hour minimum.
- When your dough is ready, liberally flour the counter, and the dough itself. Roll the dough using a floured rolling pin, rolling and turning the dough, and rolling again until the entire crust is rolled out into a 12” circle.
- Work quickly, you don’t want the dough to warm up.
- Place the pie crust in your pie pan and fold the excess, overhanging dough underneath, so the pie is now the size of the pan.
- Crimp the piecrust by making a ‘V’ by pinching the shape with your thumb and forefinger on the outside of the crust. Then, using your other pointer finger, push the crust from the inside to fit in between the V-shaped fingers. Continue all around the crust, then chill again.
4 or 5 peaches or nectarines. ( firmish is good)
2 tbsp corn flour
20gr flour
½ tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp salt
100gr sugar
60gr maple syrup
45ml sweet white wine
- Peel and slice the peaches, and then toss in a large bowl with the cornstarch, flour, cinnamon and salt.
- In a small, heavy-bottomed saucepan heat, the sugar, maple syrup, and wine until the sugar dissolves, then cook to a light caramel without stirring.
- Once the caramel turns an amber colour, remove pan from heat and add in butter, swirling the pan until the butter completely melts.
- Pour caramel over the peaches and toss to coat.
- Pile the peaches in to the pastry base and chill.
- Next prepare the crumble topping.
113 gr butter
125 gr pecans (toasted in the oven and cooled)
128 gr flour
100 gr sugar
45 gr dark brown sugar (cooked to nut brown as below)
Pinch salt
Pinch cinnamon
- Melt the butter in a wide pot or frying pan over a medium-low heat, swirling to help it along. It will foam and sing — listen carefully!)
- Once the foam has died down (it stops singing) watch it like a hawk; as soon as the solids at the bottom turn light-coloured from white to toasty brown and the butter smells almost nutty, tip into a bowl to cool.
- Chill until the consistency of soft butter.
- Sift together the flour, sugar, dark brown sugar, salt, cinnamon.
- Roughly chop the cooled pecans and mix in.
- Drizzle over the browned butter (which now should be slightly cooled), mix until crumbs form.
- Chill on a tray. For 30 minutes or till it’s fired up.
- Pre heat the oven to 180C.
- Sprinkle the crumble over the pie filling until the pie filling is completely covered.
- Cover pie crust with foil and put in the oven for 15 minutes. Make sure to put a baking sheet underneath, as it WILL bubble over and make a mess!
- After 15-20 minutes reduce the heat to 170C.
- Remove tinfoil and return to oven, cook for a further 50-60 minutes until bubbling hot inside, top and pastry are both cooked.
- Cool for at least 3 hours before cutting and serving with ice cream, cream or caramel sauce
