What's "Two Pies in a Pod"?!?! A picture's worth a thousand words, so take a closer look! Can you guess? ... The letters help, and I'll give you a hint: They don't stand for "Politically Correct" or "Personal Computer"! In fact, the letter likeness was a total accident!!!
I'll give you one more hint: Look at the colors of each letter...
They're different! ... Yep! The P is golden-yellow because peaches are on that side, and the C is red because cherries are on thatside!
So "Two Pies in a Pod" is a "dual" or "duplex" pie where you have two different types of filling in the pie, one type in each half. And each filling is in its own totally separate crust, both being in the same "pie pod"! In the same pan, really, but "Two Pies in a Pan" didn't sound quite as cute.
Think of a duplex house, where you have a mirrored-reflection house plan, but different families living in each side.
WHY?
There are two very good reasons you might want to make one of these:
A) You only have a small amount of two different kinds of fruit, and the two wouldn't mix well to form one pie. (Like if you had only a half-pie's worth of rhubarb and a half-pie's worth of blueberries. Well, that might combine well, depending on your own taste! But this is more fun!)
B) You want to make a pie for two people, one of whom likes one kind of pie, the other of whom likes another, but they don't need two pies! Like, for example, my parents-in-love...
Theirs was the first Two-Pies-in-a-Pod I made! I'm wishing now that I hadn't put it in cellophane so we could see it better, but I'll just tell you that... Dad's side is mincemeat, and you can tell that Mom's side is cherry. (This was the 50th Anniversary family dinner we did for them at our son's home because they didn't want a big party; just their family.)
These are easy
to do, and the results
are just plain FUN!
SUPPLIES
1 pie plate
2 types of fruit
Sugar and flour
(as per your recipe)
2 pie crusts
(I use ready-made, but you
can make them from scratch.)
Recipe for each
pie you are making
You'll need the recipes for both kinds of pies you want to combine, as you'll kind of be combining recipes. Not hard; I'll show you what I mean.
It's easiest to put canned fruit with canned fruit, and fresh fruit with fresh fruit as they take different amounts of baking time. That said, you could still do one of each (canned and fresh) in the same pie, but the canned fruit side might be a little over-baked if fresh fruit was in the other side.
The nice thing about your fruits being in separate sub-pods is that the two flavors do not need to go well together! They'll end up totally separate!!!
EXAMPLES
Just to give you an idea of what you can put together, here's what I used for the pie I recently made:
1 can of peaches
+ 1 can of pie cherries
I used a large can of peaches in mine, but had too much (as you'll see in a moment), so I would just use a regular 15-ounce can of sliced peaches, which I think has more peach volume than peach halves.
Or you could use:
2 large (or 3 small) apples
+ 2 cups fresh blackberries
This isn't an exact science. And since we're dividing the ingredients up and putting crust where it usually isn't ~ up the middle ~ that crust that's spanning the center (the diameter) of the pie takes up some of the space of the pie filling, so you won't need quite as much. It'll amount to being a little less than half the ingredients for each side of the pie.
DIRECTIONS
1) Put your two fruits into two separate containers. If they're in cans, just open the cans, drain them, and leave the fruit therein (or put it back in) until you're ready to use it.
2) Look up the amount of sugar and flour needed for each of the types of pies you're making. What I did was to just put the measured amounts of flour and sugar called for in a whole-pie recipe on one container, mixed them together, and estimated half of that for each side. If you need to be precise, then divide the mixture into two equal parts into two separate containers.
If the amounts needed for each side are quite different (like rhubarb needs a lot more sugar than blueberries), then you'll want to mix up half of the amount called for in the recipes for each pie, and then be sure to differentiate them on the counter so you don't get them mixed up. Like just have each sitting next to the fruit they'll be going with. [This sounds more complicated than it is. Once you get going, you'll realize that it's really just a matter of doing half the needed flour and sugar for each side.]
3) Roll out your pie crust to the appropriate size for the pie pan you're using. If you're using prepared pie crusts, allow your prepared crusts to get to room temperature before using. For an 8" pie, you don't need to roll it out any more; if it's 9 or 10 inches, you will need to roll it out a bit.
4) Carefully lift one of the pie crusts and place it in the pie plate, draping the left side over the left side of the pie plate the most neatly and carefully because it will be staying there.
5) Put one of the fruits into the left side/half of the crust. (See how many extra peaches I had from that large can?) If it's not a prepared pie filling, then now is when you add the designated amount of sugar and flour. Just sprinkle it over the fruit. I also like to "dot it with butter," which some recipes call for and some don't ~ but I just do it.
6) Take the right half of the crust and fold it up to cover the fruit. Bring the edges so they all meet along the pie pan edge, forming what looks like a turnover. (My edges wouldn't stay put until I did the next step...
7) Fold the top crust edge over and around the edge of the bottom crust, press the two crusts together, and crimp the edge around that entire half. If you're a newbie at crimping, this is just pinching the edges together in your favorite way. If you haven't done much pie crust edge crimping, see here…
I just rolled the two crust edges together, the top one going up and over the bottom one, smoothing it together as I tucked the top crust underneath, and then, using both forefinger and thumb of both hands, squished the crust between my finger toward each other by pushing my fingers toward each other.
I cut a "P" in the crust with a small, sharp-pointed knife. As you can see, I didn't let the cuts of the C-curve on the P and the straight line meet. Had I, the P would fall into the pie.
8) Repeat steps 3 through 7 on the other side...
Next I added the cherries, the flour/sugar mixture, and dotted it with butter.
Once it was all put together, edges crimped, the "C" cut (again, it's not a solid-line cut), I put short vent cuts all around the edge. (Kinda makes it look like the letters are shining, like a kindergarten sunshine, but hey ~ more sun and more youthfulness works for me!)
If you want to add a topping of some sort ~ like an egg/milk mixture, sugar ~ now is the time to do that.
And here is the beautiful (if I do say so m'self) finished "Two Pies in a Pod"!!!
And Chef Barb
(moi)
holding the dualesque
masterpiece, I mean
MasterPie(ce)!
