Apr 13, 2009
This was awesome. I used Alton Brown's pie crust recipe for this, and it worked great. The flavor of this pie is sour and wonderful. I was so pleased it wasn't oversweetened. It took 8 small granny smiths plus a full (small) bag of the dried cherries. I might add more cinnamon next time just because I'm a cinnamon junkie. I will agree with another reviewer that the cherries do kinda dominate the flavor, but that's OK by me because I love dried cherries. I found the amount of flour in the filling to be fine. As others did, I let the pie bake at 425 for just 15 minutes, then knocked it down to 350 for an hour. About 20 minutes before the end I covered it with foil so the crust wouldn't get too brown. Shoulda done the milk-and-sugar thing for the crust, but it was still a fine, fine pie without. Got rave reviews. I had a little trouble with my top crust (not enough water) so it didn't look as pretty as I wanted--but it was yummy anyway. The cherries ended up plump-ish and there wasn't any juice running all over the place even on the first cut (after cooling for five hours) so if you like the runny juice thing you might want to back off on the interior flour. I liked it exactly as it was. The pie was not tall--I might add a couple of extra apples next time to get a taller pie, but maybe not. :)
—shris
