Over time, I’ve become a bake by sense person. I generally follow recipes, but I adapt a lot and often times, if something feels off to me in a recipe, I’ll go with my gut, not with the recipe. I know that goes against the whole “baking is a science” thing. And I’m okay with that. Baking, photographing and blogging are my creative outlet, so it’s good to have it be my art, right?
So, the point of all of this, is this past weekend, I had my baking gut validated in a big way. You see, I made two pies. One following recipe almost exactly (I made one substitution for an ingredient I was missing) and one where I winged it. You guess which one turned out better.
Yeah, it was definitely the one I winged, the strawberry rhubarb crisp pictured above. It’s not that the double crusted traditional strawberry rhubarb pie in the first picture wasn’t GOOD…it’s just that its filling was like strawberry rhubarb soup. Despite the fact that I used corn starch and flour as a thickener! I suspect that the issue was the strawberries were ripe and the recipe called for a lot (1 1/2 cups) of sugar, which totally liquefied the strawberries.
For the crisp (which I made the next day), I only used 1/2 cup sugar and no thickener, and there was hardly any soup. So I’m back to the drawing board on the pie (thus no recipe) but I’ve got the crisp thing down.
And I will say, I seemed to be the only one bothered by the soupy pie. I think the whole thing lasted maybe 2 hours after it came out of the oven. And it only lasted that long because most of the house was at the beach for a bonfire!!
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I made a strawberry pie and despite adding extra flour to thicken it up, it was still a bit soupy (though not as soupy as the photo you posted). We also waited until the next day before we cut into it though. It is delicious but next time I’d add less sugar than what the recipe called for. Also, our strawberries were super ripe and bursting with water since we picked them the day after a storm. I’m sure that had an impact.
I agree that the longer the pie sits, the less soupy it is – I usually make my pies the day before I need them. That being said – I am sure it was delicious!!