One of the first signs of summer is seeing your neighbor sunbathing in the nude on their back porch. The other is strawberry-rhubarb pie. It’s good to see the world in dualities.
Senior food editor Chris Morocco developed a quintessential strawberry-rhubarb pie recipe for us to stuff our faces with all summer long. Or delicately fork! It’s sweet yet tart, with a crispy, flaky crust that doesn’t get soggy under the weight of the fruit goo. Bless his heart. Here are some important things you need to know before you go foraging for rhubarb:
Put Vodka In the Pie Crust Dough
Vodka, the ingredient that makes everything (except martinis) better, also makes your pie better. When he was developing recipes for Cook’s Illustrated, Food Lab author J. Kenji López-Alt invented a pie crust that replaced some of the water in the dough with vodka. It functions as liquid and helps form the dough and make it easier to roll out (limiting gluten-formation). Then the alcohol mostly cooks off in the oven, leaving room for tender, flaky, dreamy crust.
López-Alt has since said that he doesn’t really do this at home anymore and you can dive into his breakdown of how fat works in a crust here. If you haven’t tried the vodka trick before, though, it’s fun to experiment with. Morocco tested two versions, with and without, for strawberry-rhubarb pie and preferred the results with vodka. If you opt-out, all good, just replace that amount with water.
The Proportion of Strawberry-to-Rhubarb Must be ON POINT
Rhubarb is tart, strawberries are sugar bombs. That’s why you need more rhubarb than strawberry, and don’t skimp on the lemon zest, to round it out. The ration should be 1¼ pounds rhubarb: 1 pound strawberry. Morocco tested different fruit variations, with equal amounts of each—way too sweet—and with different brands of strawberries. He went with Driscoll’s because he’s a classic man, and because certain specialty strawberries were too sweet and tended to get mushy (good for snackin, bad for pie’in). For the rhubarb, he goes for skinny and green (maximum tart), but that’s a personal preference.
Pie Is Better on Day 2
This is a hot take, but stay with me. Once the pie is cooled, there’s enough starch in the recipe so that it stays together. BUT. By day two, says Morocco, it’s even better. The filling is set and won’t ooze out at all, which means this is a great recipe to make the day before the party and be the to-do-list-crosser-outer you always knew you were.
