Eat Plum-Raspberry Pie for Breakfast or Dessert, Because Why Not?
Each Thursday on Food52, Emily Vikre (a.k.a. fiveandspice) will be sharing a new way to love breakfast — because breakfast isn’t just the most important meal of the day. It’s also the most awesome.
Today: Ditch your go-to breakfast and bake yourself a pie instead.
In her fantastic book, An Everlasting Meal, Tamar Adler makes a passing reference to “the perfect solitary sybaritic breakfast of pasta eaten directly out of a cold bowl, in bewilderment and utter presence.”
How someone can so casually make such an evocative statement is beyond me, but I do know that feeling of bewilderment and utter presence. I don’t get it from eating pasta for breakfast — my pasta leftovers always find their way elsewhere — but it is very much the feeling I get when eating leftover pie, cold, directly from the pie tin, armed with just a fork and no agenda. If others are awake, you may have to use a plate. And share. But if you are the first person to rise (which you should make a habit of being if there is pie to be had), then the solitary eating of leftover pie from the pie plate is your right, and your duty.
More: In case you want more pies to eat for breakfast, here are 9.
I don’t know how the love of leftover pie for breakfast became such a thing. But pie makes for spectacular leftovers, so perhaps pie for breakfast has always been a thing. Perhaps the Pilgrims first celebrated Thanksgiving so there would be leftover pie for breakfast. The Founding Fathers may, unbeknownst to the history books, have declared independence at the height of summer fruit season for lattice-topped reasons. Perhaps the circumference of a circle was first calculated in order to give us an excuse to dedicate a day in March to pi(e), thereby yielding leftovers. Perhaps, perhaps.
The thing about pie for breakfast is that it manages to feel both indulgent — because it is — and wholesome, in a sort of “in my mind I am a hardworking farmhand who shovels hay bales 12 hours a day and therefore has every right to eat butter and fruit for breakfast” way.
Nearly any pie is good for breakfast, but fruit pie is great. And if you are into lopsided reasoning, you can reason that a fruit pie is not so far off from toast with jam and lots and lots of butter. I put so much butter on my toast, I may as well be eating pie (under my stewardship and butter knife, an English muffin tastes suspiciously like a croissant).
More: Get Christina Tosi’s English Muffin recipe, then turn them into croissants.
Leftover pie should not be an everyday breakfast, to be sure, but neither should fresh pie be an everyday dessert. And when you do have a leftover piece of pie to steal for breakfast, you may as well glory in it. I like to eat mine in the company of an egg or a small bowl of yogurt, just to flesh out my breakfast a bit.
More: Pick up this pie plate on our online shop, Provisions — your breakfast deserves to be beautiful.
I have been reading the children’s rhyming book Each Peach Pear Plum a great deal lately, and it ends with, “Plum pie in the sun, I spy everyone!” Spying everyone happily picnicking with their plum pie made me want my own. I added a handful of raspberries because I had them, and the resulting pie is one of my favorites to date — for breakfast or any other meal.
Plum Raspberry Pie
Makes one 9-inch pie
For the crust:
1 3⁄4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup (2 sticks) cold butter, cut into chunks
2 egg yolks
3 tablespoons cold milk
Stir the flour sugar and salt together in a medium mixing bowl. Cut in the butter chunks just until they are about the size of pecans and the flour will hold together a bit when you clump it.
Whisk together the egg yolks and milk in another small bowl, then dump this into the flour mixture and stir until the dough just comes together in a shaggy mess.
Turn your shaggy mess out onto a cold, un-floured work surface. Gather the dough into a tight mound, then using the palm of your hand, smear the dough down the side of the mound on each side, moving around the mound so all the dough gets smeared. This is a process called fraissage. Scrape the dough back into a mound and repeat. At this point the dough should have come together into a pretty cohesive mass streaked with butter.
Gather the dough, divide it into 2 pieces with one just a bit larger than the other (the bottom crust needs to be a little larger than the top), wrap each tightly in plastic wrap and flatten them into disks. Refrigerate for at least 4 hours before using.
For the filling and assembly:
1 recipe pie crust
8 ripe plums, pitted and sliced into 1-inch thick slices (no need to peel)
1 cup raspberries
1 cup sugar
2 tablespoons cornstarch
Beaten egg, for an egg wash (I actually skipped the egg wash, but it makes the pie look nicer)
Heat your oven to 350° F. In a large bowl, toss together the plum slices, raspberries, sugar, and cornstarch until the fruit is coated.
On a well-floured work surface, roll out the larger of your crust disks into a circle that’s about 12 inches across. Transfer the dough circle into a 9-inch pie pan, gently pressing it into place, and leaving a 1/4-inch lip around the edge of the pie plate.
Transfer the fruit mixture into the pie plate. Roll out the other piece of dough into a circle that’s about 10 inches across. Place this on top of the pie, pinch the edges together and crimp them to seal the pie. Poke some slits in the center of the pie to allow steam to escape. Freeze the pie for about 30 minutes.
Put the pie on a rimmed baking sheet to catch the mess of fruit that always bubbles out (the crust sometimes leaks some butter too). Brush the top with your egg wash, if you’ve made one, then bake it in the center of the oven until the crust is golden brown and the fruit is bubbling (about 1 1/2 hours). Allow to cool at least one hour (and preferably more like 3 hours) before eating, to give the filling time to set. Of course, this shouldn’t be a problem since you made it so you could have it for breakfast the next day anyway, didn’t you?!
Save and print the recipe on Food52.
Photos by Emily Vikre
This article originally appeared on Food52.com: Plum Raspberry Pie (for Breakfast)
