Baking with Olivia and Caroline

June 2021 Recipe – Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

By Published On: May 28th, 2021

Summer has arrived and with it are fresh, seasonal fruits (and vegetables) like strawberries (and rhubarb)! With that in mind, there’s no better match for our June recipe than a can’t-go-wrong-with-this-pie… pie. Strawberry rhubarb pie is a classic, and has just the right combination of tangy and sweet.

Ingredients

1 1/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 cup flour
2 cups sliced  fresh strawberries
2 cups 1” fresh rhubarb pieces
2 tbs butter
1 tbs sugar
1/4 tsp nutmeg

Directions

Use your favorite pie crust recipe or store bought; this is a two-crust pie.

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

Combine sugar, salt, flour, strawberries and rhubarb in a large bowl and mix well. Pour the mixture into the pastry-lined pie plate. Dot with 2 tbs butter and sprinkle with 1/4 tsp nutmeg. Place top pastry on top of mixture, cut plenty of vents in the top or create a lattice top as we did.

Brush top pastry with water and sprinkle with sugar. I did not use the entire tablespoon of sugar as I thought it was a little too much sugar.

Bake for 40-50 minutes (ours was done at exactly 40 minutes).

This recipe was given to me by my mom. My mom is an incredible cook/ baker. She makes everything from scratch. There was always some sort of a homemade sweet treat to be had in the house when we were growing up. This pie being a spring- and summertime favorite.

As a little kid, I recall following my mom into the back yard to the rhubarb patch with a small dish of sugar excited and eager to dip my rhubarb stalk into it. Rhubarb without sugar is quite bitter tasting. To be honest, I’m not sure if I ate the rhubarb or just sucked the sugar off the stalk!

This past Mother’s Day I had the pleasure of making this pie with not just Caroline, but with my oldest daughter, Claire, as well. We went to a local farm stand, visited the rhubarb patch and offered up two fun facts about rhubarb. One being that the leaves of the plant are poisonous, the other being that rhubarb isn’t actually a fruit, it’s a vegetable.

For this pie we also used my mom’s super flaky and delicious pie crust recipe. I have to admit that I am not the best pie crust-maker and my mom’s always tastes so much better and is way flakier than I could ever master, however, for this pie, it was pretty darn close to tasting and flaking like hers.

This pie is very simple The strawberries and rhubarb aren’t masked by anything else. They are the shining components to this pie and sometimes in life isn’t simplicity best?

So, support your local farm stands, grab some rhubarb and strawberries and make yourself a super easy homemade pie!

Tips:

Fresh fruit pies can tend to be very runny. I did pre-bake the bottom crust for about 5 minutes. You may also want to place the pie on a baking sheet and then placing it in the oven to catch the drips.

It is yummy on its own, but served warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and – holy moly – deliciousness!

Olivia and Caroline are enthusiastic foodies and bakers who are constantly in the kitchen, as well as explorers who create their own adventures in our area – and did we mention they are mother and daughter? Follow Olivia on Instagram to see her many creations at @oliviawvalentine.