Cherry Lattice Pie

I picked this for my first pie of the project because cherries are in season. Or rather, they’ve been in season for awhile now, and I’m afraid they will suddenly disappear from the fruit stalls, in which case I’ll have to wait until next year to make this pie.  It was a good choice because it was quite delicious. I never really liked cherry pie before because I’ve only ever had the store-bought ones, which have a lot of cherry flavoring, which I’ve always associated with the taste of children’s Tylenol, which I hated as a kid (my mother considered it an absolute panacea, and I had to gulp down a dose for nearly everything). This confirms the need to counteract bad experiences with good ones.

       However, I made the mistake of making 2/3 of the recipe meant for a 9 in. pie for an 8 in. one. This had worked fine for me in the past (especially for topless pies), making a “perfectly modest” pie with smaller portions. But in this case, things looked a little… stretched. I had to roll the crust quite thin, and the lattice top could’ve used a couple more strips. It was a pity because I followed all the directions for the crust religiously: freezing the flour and part of the butter, resting the dough overnight to relax the gluten, resting it again for 3 hours after rolling, kneading it in a plastic bag, etc. In the end, though, the crust was too thin to be too flaky. And of course, the practically tropical heat of Korea’s summer probably negated many of my precautions. And the humidity took another big toll after it came out of the oven. I would be cursing the climate, but after having experienced far worse in other parts of the globe, all I can say is that I have an additional reason to look forward to fall. 

     All in all, aside from the mediocre crust, it was very tasty and disappeared very quickly. The three of us finished it off in less than a day. I think the fresh cherries really saved the pie (and the pie redeemed cherries for me). The fleshy cherries with a slight chew and the thick juices that didn’t run at all… yum! I would love to make this pie again, if I didn’t have 167 more to go.