Holy cow this is good. It better be, for how long it took. The combo of shatteringly-crisp butter crust, concentrated peach flavor, and a delicious crumbly oat streusel is pretty hard to beat. Claire says in the video that this method gets you a pie that cuts more like a bar cookie - that is, the filling doesn’t seep or weep. I was dubious this would work so well, but it really, really did - even cutting it warm, it didn’t weep.
Method, roughly, is making all the components separately:
- Pie crust (make and chill before rolling out)
- Blanch, peel, chop peaches, and dress with sugar, spices and flavorings. Let marinate for a bit.
- Make streusel, refrigerate
- Reduce some of the peach juices, thicken with a cornstarch slurry, put thickened juices in ice bath before recombining with chopped peaches
- Assemble pie: bottom crust, single layer of peaches, thick layer of streusel.
- Long bake: 20 min at 425, then somewhere between 25-40 min more at 350. Mine was very well-browned before the peaches were chaotically bubbling, so I pulled it before the crust burned.
I made 2/3 of a recipe (the original is for a half sheet pan and serves 20 people - yikes!) I also didn’t use her crust - I used 1.5 recipe of Erin McDowell’s all-butter pie dough, which I made and semi-laminated yesterday, let rest overnight, and rolled out into the single bottom crust today. I kept it in the freezer in the pan while I prepared the rest of the recipe.
I was worried about the flavorings in the recipe; I don’t love vanilla in applications like this, and prefer my in-season peach bakes not to have much in the way of spices. The warm piece I just ate was pretty darn good, though, my fears aside. I cut back on the ginger and nutmeg; if I were to make this again I’d stick to just the lemon the recipe and some cinnamon. And no vanilla, for god’s sake. Why would you ever do that to perfect local peaches? I myself cannot forgive myself for this.
Someone in the comment section in the Youtube video did a metric conversion of the ingredients, and I used that to scale my pie down. After I poured the prepared peaches and reduced peach juices into the crust, I realized I was maybe a single additional peach short of enough filling, so I quickly grabbed another, peeled it without blanching, and chopped and threw it in. Perfect.
It’s annoying that this recipe isn’t in Dessert Person, but only in the video and even there the method isn’t written down (you have to watch the vid to get it.)
