A Good Food Day: Reboot Your Health with Food That Tastes Great (36 page)

Blueberry Pie

BLUEBERRY
PIE
SERVES 8

I’m drawn to simple, rustic, shareable sweets—the kind I can make with my daughters and set in the center of the table with a stack of plates and forks. The pinnacle for me? Pie. When my family descends on Martha’s Vineyard for summer vacation, it’s a pie-making, pie-eating frenzy. Rhubarb, strawberry, and, my favorite, blueberry pie. The point here is to highlight the blueberries—no frills, no unnecessary steps, and no added sugar needed. Since it requires very few ingredients, this pie relies heavily on fresh summer blueberries and good-quality grass-fed butter. For me, there is no crust except an all-butter crust. I’m willing to switch up the flour though, and I’ve found whole wheat pastry flour produces an equally flaky, mild, and buttery crust as white flour.
▪

Cold ingredients are key to tender, flaky crust. Make sure your butter is well chilled and your water is ice-cold. Also, it helps to chill your pastry cutter and metal bowl in the freezer and pull them out only when you’re ready to make the dough.

CRUST

14 tablespoons (1¾ sticks) unsalted grass-fed butter

2 cups whole wheat pastry flour, plus more for rolling out

½ teaspoon fine sea salt

FILLING

6 cups blueberries (about 3 pints)

Finely grated zest of 1 lemon

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

3 tablespoons cornstarch

Pinch of fine sea salt

1
For the crust: Cut the butter into pats, lay them on a plate, and freeze them for 15 minutes.

2
In a large metal bowl, whisk the flour and salt together. Scatter the frozen pats of butter in the flour. Using a pastry cutter or a fork, work the butter into the flour until it resembles coarse crumbs with pea-size pellets of butter visible throughout. Drizzle in ½ cup very cold water. Use your hands to gather the dough together, but handling it as little as is needed to get it into one mound. As soon as it comes together (when you can pinch a piece of it and it holds its shape), dump out the dough onto a clean work surface and shape it into a fat cylinder, like a can.

3
Separate one-third of the dough, so you have 2 mounds. Shape each mound into a flattened round disk, wrap them tightly in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 1 hour and up to 3 days. The dough can also be frozen for up to 1 month.

4
Preheat the oven to 425°F. Position a rack in the center of the oven and place a foil-lined baking sheet on a lower rack to catch any blueberry juice overflow from the pie.

5
Remove the larger disk of dough from the refrigerator. On a well-floured surface, flatten the dough and sprinkle a bit of flour over the top and on a rolling pin. Roll the dough out into a round roughly 12 inches in diameter. Picture a clock and roll from the center out toward every number, all the way around. Each time the dough expands about an inch around, sprinkle a bit more flour, flip the dough and roll out the other side. Use a pastry scraper around the edges to make sure the dough isn’t sticking. (It’s okay if the edges crack—they can be pinched together.) Fold the dough in half, then in half again. Put it in the center of a 9-inch glass pie plate, unfold it so it’s centered, and gently press it into the edges. The dough should
hang about an inch over the rim of the pan.

6
For the filling: In a large bowl, combine the blueberries, lemon zest, lemon juice, cornstarch, and salt and toss to coat. Pile the blueberries into the pie crust (they should almost overflow).

7
Remove the remaining disk of dough from the refrigerator and roll it out into a round about 10 inches in diameter using the same method as before. Fold it in half, then in half again, lay it over the top of the blueberry mound and unfold it. Working your way around the edge of the pie, press the top and bottom crusts together and fold them under. Crimp the edges with your fingers to seal. Using a paring knife, cut 4 (3-inch) slits in the top crust and 4 shorter slits in between those, so steam can escape.

8
Put the pie on the center rack in the oven and bake for 20 minutes. Reduce the heat to 350°F and bake until the crust is golden brown and the blueberries are bubbling, about 40 minutes longer. Let it cool on a wire rack for at least 1 hour. The pie will thicken the longer it cools.

People have such anxiety about making pie.
Relax
. Making dough can actually be quite zenlike, especially when doing it by hand. The only way to learn what good pie dough should look and feel like is through the tactile sensation of hand-forming it. With a food processor, it’s too easy to overwork the dough and overmix the butter—two actions that kill the potential for good crust.

The Great Cholesterol Myth
by Jonny Bowden and Stephen Sinatra

The New Glucose Revolution
by Dr. Jennie Brand-Miller, Dr. Thomas M. S. Wolever, Kaye Foster-Powell, and Dr. Stephen Colagiuri

The Inflammation Syndrome
by Jack Challem

Nourishing Traditions
by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig

The 4-Hour Body
by Timothy Ferriss

The Blood Sugar Solution
by Dr. Mark Hyman

Clean
by Dr. Alejandro Junger

Fat Chance
by Dr. Robert Lustig

In Defense of Food
,
Food Rules
, and
Cooked
by Michael Pollan

Why We Get Fat
by Gary Taubes

Monterey Bay Seafood Watch:
SeafoodWatch.org

Eat Wild:
EatWild.org

American Grass-fed Association:
AmericanGrassfed.org

Local Harvest:
LocalHarvest.org

My acknowledgments begin with my wife, Amanda. Why and how does my wife play so integrally into the reality of this book? Well, if it weren’t for her, I would probably still be a smoking, boozing, carb-loading, unhealthy mess, and the chances of me writing a book about what it means to have a good food day would be zero. She got me on the train to wellness, and her influence never came in a nagging, preaching kind of way; it was delivered consistently, over time, with a level of nonchalance that somehow had a tremendous impact. All the time I looked and felt like shit, I coexisted with my svelte, energetic, beautiful wife, and kept thinking,
I want some of what she’s got.
Up early, eating a great breakfast, exercising, doing yoga, packing delicious-looking salads for her lunch and cooking simple, clean proteins with some local veggies for dinner. She understands the power of what we put in and on our bodies and advocated for getting all the toxic shit out of our apartment, insisting on organic or local meat and produce. My wife, more than anyone I know, cares deeply about the food she eats and feeds to our two beautiful daughters, and for that, I am eternally grateful. She is also an English teacher and has poured over page after page of the many iterations of this book from conception to completion, lending her expertise and insights along the way. The title of this book and the name of my first restaurant are both Amanda’s doing, and all of this together just scratches the surface of why I am grateful to have her as my partner in crime.

Tammy Walker, damn … what can I say? Talk about doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Without her dedication this book would still be a work in progress. We spent countless afternoons together cooking and talking and eating, and cooking some more. In the process, she acquired an uncanny ability to capture my thoughts and beliefs on the pages of this book. Incredibly generous with her time, she has been a genuine, positive, and smiling presence throughout this process, and a
huge
part of why this book came out as great as it has. Michael Harlan Turkell was a joy to work with as well, and his photos speak for themselves. I enjoyed my days working with him so much that I seriously contemplated a career change to food stylist.

Close to four years ago, Pam Krauss was willing to sit in a nondescript midtown coffee shop, drinking crappy coffee and listening to me pitch this book. She believed in the idea of a chef-driven companion cookbook to all of the health and nutrition books that I was devouring, and thankfully she supported this project from the get-go. The fact that she did means a whole lot—she is a no-bullshit kind of lady and I respect that immensely.