There’s a time and place for different desserts — cake for birthdays, gingerbread for the holidays — and now is the moment for strawberry-rhubarb pie.
It’s not just that strawberry and rhubarb’s harvests are converging or that it tastes like a summer dream of barn doors and wide blue skies. It’s that pinching dough is a nice break from tapping screens, and only you (no chatbot!) can tell when to sprinkle more flour on the rolling pin. A.I. can’t sense whether another splash of water will gather the straggling wisps of flour and achieve the liminal space where the dough feels neither wet nor dry.
I’m not going to tell you that making dough from scratch is fast and easy. Honestly, it’s sort of hard and takes time. That’s what makes it rewarding in a world where optimizing for efficiency and clear outcomes sometimes outweighs the pursuit of good things. (Is there anything better than homemade pie?)
Learning to create those buttery tissue-thin layers, tender enough so a fork can glide right through top to bottom, is the kind of kitchen skill that goes from daunting to relaxing after a few rounds. While bakers have come up with smart methods for more foolproof doughs — Kenji López-Alt uses a food processor to make a flour-fat paste in an update to his vodka trick, Rose Levy Beranbaum blends in cream cheese — the one surefire way to nail pie dough is to make a lot of pies. The baker and pie teacher Kate McDermott, writing in her book “Pie Camp,” describes it as “a craft of patience and practice.”
Roasting the strawberries helps reduce their water content and concentrate their flavor.Credit…Kelly Marshall for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Roscoe Betsill. Prop Stylist: Paige Hicks.
This recipe yields buttery tissue-thin layers that give way to the glide of a fork.Credit…Kelly Marshall for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Roscoe Betsill. Prop Stylist: Paige Hicks.
For summer fruit pies, old-fashioned is the way to go: basic ingredients and working by hand. To end up with a crust delicate enough to shatter like a broken window, you just need to keep the ingredients cold, handle the dough like a baby and rely on your senses. Achieving this starts with following a recipe, and then adjusting it to feel.
The same is true for rolling the dough. After it’s chilled to fully hydrate and firm up, it’ll need just enough flour to not stick to your work surface or pin, and only you can know whether or not it requires more. Only you can see whether the fat is starting to melt and turn shiny and needs to go back in the fridge before you keep rolling.
As for the filling here, whole berries are roasted first to concentrate their sugars and caramelize them to the brink of char, which accentuates rhubarb’s tang and mellows its sharpness. Because strawberries are about 90 percent water, even ripe ones tend to flop into bland blobs when tossed raw into filling. This simple roasting step eliminates that watery risk.
Once the crimson mounds of rhubarb disappear from market shelves, you can keep refining your dough skills to accommodate cherries, blueberries, peaches and anything else sweet and ripe. By the time apples fall, making dough will be, well, easy as pie. After decades of baking, I still get giddy when I pull a bubbling beast from the oven, even on off days when the bottom is softer than I want or the edge slouches off the rim. Each step is so tactile, calling me to truly focus so I can end up with this one lovely, humble thing, made possible only with my own hands.
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