We love going berry picking in the summer — you’ll find us scooping up strawberries, plucking blueberries and dodging thorns while attempting to collect black raspberries. This year we moved into a house that had a garden full of blackberry bushes.
Every day or so, the girls and I head outside and scoot around picking the ripe black berries. Sometimes there are 10, sometimes there are a few cups. A few of them end up in our mouths but several times we’ve gathered enough to make some pie. We adapted my friend Ann-Marie’s blueberry pie recipe to work with the berries from our yard. This recipe will work with berries from u-pick berry farms, your own backyard and the grocery store.
Wash the black berries (you need about 4 cups) and then in a bowl, gently mix in sugar (2/3 cup), flour (1/2 cup) and cinnamon (1/2-1 tsp). We like to add extra cinnamon. Also, blackberries are very tart, you may want to consider adding more sugar. We like the tartness.
Use a store bought pie crust and place it on the bottom of the pie pan. Pour/scoop the berry mixture into the pie crust and place a few small slices of butter on top of the berries. Cover the berries with another pie crust. Make slits on top. We used a cookie cutter to make our initials for the top using leftover pie crust.
Use an egg yolk as a glaze and brush it across the top of your pie crust. Milk is also a great glaze for the top. Egg makes it crispy and crusty and milk helps retain the color and moistness of the crust. If you use milk, sprinkle some sugar across the top too.
We baked ours at 425 for 40 minutes. My friend Ann-Marie uses foil and lays it lightly on top of her pie for the first 25 minutes of baking. I wish I had done that. It makes it less “burny” and more even in the cooking. I forgot this time. With blueberries and other berries, you can turn the heat down to about 400 but with blackberries, everything I read said to heat the oven to 425.
It’s so easy to include your children in cooking, baking and food preparations. Just assign them tasks that are age appropriate. Using fresh foods and produce to create delicious meals and snacks is a great way to incorporate them into your diet and when children help, they’re more likely to eat them.
