Pie with no mushy fruit?
This is a weird question but I want to bake a fruit pie for my family but my sister “doesn’t like mushy fruit.” I realize that any time you bake fruit it will become “mushy.” I wasn’t sure if there was any different type of pie or pastry that wouldn’t affect the fruit as much?
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Have made this dozens of times to standing ovations! Not kidding...it's that good and really easy.
"How to Make Perky Fruit Pies, Not Fruit Puddles"
https://food52.com/blog/22704-how-to-make-perky-fruit-pies-not-fruit-puddles
From personal experience (both as a baker and as a diner), I've see apple pies/tarts that featured cooked apples that were pretty firm in texture, even after baking.
I believe some of these are often used in commercial apple pastries for this reason. Often the apple varieties that retain their shape are used by commercial pastry shops in France for their "tarte aux pommes." These are usually made with a flaky dough like puff pastry and fanned thinly sliced apples on a shallow crust, rather than the big and deep American style pie featuring gooey blobs of apple.
https://food52.com/recipes/35396-fresh-strawberry-tart
from Alice Medrich. This is the same type of "tarte aux fraises" that one would find in every pastry shop in France.
Basically, you blind bake a tart crust, fill it with pastry cream and top with fresh (raw) fruit.
For strawberries, you can either leave whole or slice-and-fan. For smaller berries such as raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, et al, you just keep whole. One can also combine several berries in the same tart (I generally like to stick with one).
As for the presentation, the two classic options are glazing with jelly made from the same fruit (zap in microwave to liquify or heat gently in saucepan) or sprinkling with powdered sugar right before serving.
One also has the option of making individual tartlets or a bigger tart to be cut into individual servings.
The variations are endless and the simple vanilla pastry cream can be flavored or replaced by other similar fillings (e.g., mascarpone). You can also glaze the bottom of the baked empty tart shell with caramel -- for a crunchy texture -- before you put in the pastry cream.
The sky's the limit for this classic basic.
You'd just use your trusty tart dough and your trusty pastry cream preparations. If you already have favorite recipes for both, there's no reason why you can't use them (that's the way they would be made in a commercial pastry kitchen).
For me, I'd use either pâte brisée or pâte sablée for the tart dough and my reliable pastry cream recipe I have in an old notebook.
Admittedly, I like old-school preparations and this is about as brainless as you can get for a fresh fruit tart.
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