Vegan Sour Cherry Rhubarb Steusel Pie
One of our closest friends are vegan so it is a fun challenge to have them over for dinner. I still have frozen rhubarb from another friend who lives in the countryside so decided that the sour cherry rhubarb combination was so good it needed to be repeated, but this time without my all butter crust.
Following Rose Beranbaum’s vegetable shortening recipe in her book I made a shortening based crust. I much prefer the flavour of butter to shortening’s lack of flavour, but shortening has some positive attributes as well. It is softer at fridge temperature so starts to roll out extremely well right out of the fridge. It also doesn’t melt on you as easily as you roll it out and handle the dough. It browns more quickly than butter based pastry which is a positive or a negative as long as you are aware of this. Despite shielding the edge of the crust after it was par-baked, fill and topped it still ended up more brown with slight bitterness I associate with over baked crust edge. In the future, I’d shield it even soon maybe even right from the start of par-baking. Finally it can make a flaky crust if you give the dough enough folds, but it easily is much more tender than an all butter crust.
For the streusel topping, I used a vegan butter. Once again I missed the flavour of butter in the topping, however, the streusel’s flavour had hints of butter in it from the vegan butter. I browned nicely without over baking.
Final note to self, when pre-cooking the filling there is no need to fully heat and fully thicken it. I would probably just cook until it just starts to thicken and leave it loose as it will fully cook in the oven in the pie.
I added some almond extract to the filling along with lemon juice, both these additions really enhanced the pie. As you know almond and cherry go extremely well together so a bit of almond extract just makes the cherry sing without making itself been known. Lemon juice is almost always a positive from making fruit pies sing that that is no different there.
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