tillo-berry pie

They really are fruits.

If you've ever seen a cape gooseberry, you'll know where I'm going with this. They're also sometimes called 'husk cherries'. I was served one once as a garnish on a fancy dessert, and had no clue what it was, so I didn't eat it. I really should have.

Because then I'd be able to tell you how they taste compared to a tomatillo.

Yup, a tomatillo. Very closely related to the cape gooseberry, in look and in taste.

Like tomatoes, tomatillos seem to have been relegated to the realm of savoury foods. They don't have to be though. They really are kinda sweet. They've got a bit of a citrus flavour to them too. And they pair nicely with cinnamon when you put them in a pie. It comes out as kinda 'mock apple' which is good I think, because it kinda eases people into the idea that you can actually eat this thing in a sweet dish.

The trend lately with foods seems to be the addition of sweet things to savoury ones, so Recipe Guy and I (being contrary, as usual) decided that we'd take something typically savoury and make it sweet.

Tillo-Berry Pie

• about 1 pound of small tomatillos
• 3/4 c sugar
• 3 tbsp tapioca
• 1 tsp lemon zest
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg
• double pice crust 

If you want to make your own crust, you'll need

• 2/3 c cold butter
• 2 1/2 c flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 6-8 tbsp cold water

I like making my own crust, and it's really quite easy. Unlike making cakes and muffins, you want all of your pie crust ingredients nice and chilly.

Cut the cold butter into chunks about a tbsp in size, and dump in the flour and salt.

Use a pastry cutter to cut it all together until the biggest chunks of butter are about the size of peas.

Sprinkle on about 5 tbsp of ice water, and use a fork to cut the water into the flour. You don't want to "mix" this.

Mixing causes gluten to form and stretch, which is great for cakes and bread, but really the opposide of what you want for a flaky tender pastry.

Dump the very crumbly mixture out onto your rolling surface and add another tbsp or two of water.

The way I deal with pastry now is patting and folding. Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake baker's me! Resist the urge to do anything remotely related to kneading.

At first, the folding will be a bit weird, and not much like folding. You'll just be picking up part of the dough and putting it on top of another part, and then pressing them together. If it doesn't hold well after a couple times of doing this, sprinkle on a bit of water, and then fold a few more times.

Eventually, you'll end up with a lump that mostly sticks together after you pat it.

Cut this lump in half, set the slightly smaller half aside, and flour the other one, your surface, and your rolling pin. Check as you roll to make sure that it's not sticking.

If it is, use a knife to gently separate it from your surface, and flour both the surface and the pastry.

Roll it until it's a good couple inches in diameter bigger than your pie plate.

Use your rolling pin to help you carry it to the pie plate.

The filling is pretty simple.

Peel the pretty little paper lanterns off your tomatillos, and rinse them off.

Recipe Guy seems to have one plant that makes slightly purple tomatillos. Apparently there are varieties that are entirley purple.

Slice the tillos. Put them in a bowl.

Dump the other stuff on top.

Stir. Dump the filling into the crust.

Easy as...

The other half of your pie crust needs to be rolled out now. You can make a circle and put it on top whole (cut slits in it for steam to escape), or you can do a lattice top. A lot easier than you think and makes people say "ooo".

Roll out your other half into a rectangle, and slice it into 7 strips.

Lay 3 strips on the pie, and then fold the middle one back, and lay one of the remaining 4 across the two strips.

Switch! One comes forward, two go back.

Repeat until you run out of strips.

Press the edges of the strips to the edge of the bottom crust, and use the scraps left after cutting your strips to fill in the blank spots.

I recommend brushing the crust with a beaten egg now, rather than after it's been in the oven for 20 minutes. The egg makes is lovely and shiney, and helps its brown a bit too.

Bake at 425 for 20 minutes, then turn down the heat to 350, and bake for another 30 minutes.

The early high heat helps the crust brown and crisp before the fruit starts oozing juices all over it and making it soggy. The later lower heat makes those juices bubble into tasty sweet filling.

It worked! It really worked!

I think I'd like to put a few more tomatillos in next time, and maybe less cinnamon to make it less like a mock apple and more like a tillo pie, but it really did work!

What "savoury" ingredient do you think would work well in a sweet?

You Jelly?

This is a mesquite tree.

Mesquite trees have thorns. Be careful.

Mesquite trees also make beans.

Lots of them.

Beans can be made into jelly.

Beans?? Yup. Beans.

When they're "ripe" you can hear the seeds rattling around inside them, but a couple green ones isn't going to hurt anything.

Bean Jelly. Not Green Jelly, the hilarious 80s band that did a cover of "Three Little Pigs" metal style.

And the best part is that the beans grow wild across the street from Recipe Guy's house.

Mesquite Bean Jelly

• About a gallon of mesquite beans
• Water
• 2 c sugar
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• 1/2 package of dry fruit pectin

I hate using the "package" measure, but I'm not sure how much that was... the package says 49 grams, so I guess around 25? It looked like maybe 1/6 of a cup... I think.

Kinda.

Um, I forgot to do an Ingredients pic with this one, so I'm just going to keep typing like I know what I'm doing.

The best way to rinse the beans is in a sink full of water.

This also encourages any critters who have been munching on your beans to vacate them. Yes, there will be critters. This is wild food which means it's someone else's link in the food chain, and you're going to have to out compete them if you want to eat.

Pick through the beans and remove any that have holes in them or look like they've been nibbled on. We had about a 50% recovery: we picked about 2 gallons of beans to get 1 gallon of usable ones.

Break the beans into pieces, cover them with an inch or two of cold water (above the bean level), and bring them to a boil.

After about 5 minutes, it starts to smell kinda sweet, almost like chamomile tea. Once it's boiled for 5 minutes, turn the heat off, cover it, and let it steep for another 30.

Definitely tea.

There's a distinct floral aroma, that you wouldn't expect from beans.

Strain the beans. You can pause here in the process and refridgerate or freeze your bean tea if you've done enough for the day.

When you're ready to make jelly, dump the tea back in the pot and bring it back to a boil. Keep boiling until you have 1 1/2 cups of tea. The colour definitely darkens as you concentrate it. This isn't the best light, but it's a lovely reddish gold colour.

(you can check your level by either pouring hot tea into a pyrex cup to check and then back into the pot to continue, or: before you start, put 1.5 cups of water in your pot to get an idea of what that level looks like then dump it out and put the tea in to boil)

I think this is the point at which we made a mistake.

Not a cataclysmic one by any means, but the end product wasn't quite what we were expecting.

We didn't let our tea cool.

This messed with our pectin, which needs to start out cool and then be heated, not poured into a pot of boiling tea.

Oops.

So, let your tea cool. Completely. Like until it's not hot.

Neither of us have ever made jam or jelly before and had no clue ... Taneasha is laffing at us, I know.

Okay, so with your cool concentrated tea...

Put the tea back in the pot and add the lemon juice, sugar, and the pectin.

Stir this gently as you bring it back to a boil. The recipe we found at Edible Austin said to boil it one minute, but looking at the pectin package... I'm seeing slightly different instructions. So, in addition not to starting with boiling tea, read the directions. (freaking engineers, think they know how to do things without instructions... )

Keep it at a full rolling boil (this means that the boil doesn't stop or slow if you stir it) for one minute.

Pour your supposedly thickened jelly into a large clean jar.

You can actually see the tiny beads of solidified pectin stuck to the sides of the pot in this pic. That's where some of the missing "jelly" went, I think. Wouldn't have happened if we'd started with cold tea.

We aren't properly "canning" the jelly because we only made a tiny test batch, and we're pretty sure it's going to be eaten quickly.

Because although it has the consistency of syrup,

it tastes fucking awesome.

The floral aroma totally stayed, and there's a distinct flavour of wildflower honey. Amazing on biscuits and with late season peaches.

This was my first attempt at using pectin to gel anything. What have you canned?