Novel Food - Vinegar Pie

Wow. It's been a while since I've put up a blog post. So why not start back with some food that seems fairly improbable - but also totally doable with what most people have in their pantries on a cold, snowy winter weekend?

And, come on. Who doesn't like a nice slice of pie?

But... okay... the title of this post says that I made a "vinegar pie" - what the hell is that? And where did I get the idea? I'm so glad you asked...

(By the way... YouTube has seriously updated the way you upload videos in the past few months. We'll see if I take advantage of any of them to class up my videos in the coming months...)

So... Yeah... Vinegar pie was inspired by Farmer Boy - book three of the "Little House" books by Laura Ingalls Wilder - which I read for my Book Club. There's a scene in the book where Almanzo Wilder (at the time, about 9 years old, I believe) is eating all sorts of food, and "vinegar pie" is one of his favorites. 

This sent me on a quest to find out whether such a thing existed in the 21st century - and whether I could find a workable recipe. (In other words, nothing that talked about brining pork in barrels or making my own vinegar...)

Happily, the recipe I found only needed 5 ingredients (plus an unbaked 9-inch pie shell): 

As you can probably see in those screenshots, the recipe came from TasteofHome.com

Quick and easy recipe. Good Book Club tie-in. Seemed like the perfect pairing to me!

So I gathered my ingredients (and... well... made a pie crust - but you can totally just use a store-bought one if you'd prefer):

Somehow, knowing that these were the only ingredients didn't make me less nervous about the pie. It did, however, make me re-check the recipe for how much vinegar was going in. 

I started by melting the butter (so that I could cool it a bit and not end up with scrambled eggs).

After that, this is pretty much a dump - mix - bake recipe. 

Eggs and sugar first.

Which gave me this consistency:

Then melted butter, 

for this consistency:

Then vanilla (the brown spot)...

I won't lie. Part of me wanted to stop here with just a nice vanilla custard kind of thing going on.

 ...and vinegar,

This made me more nervous than I thought it would.

and I was happy to see that it didn't really cause this all to fall apart.

"Happy" and also very relieved.

Into the pie shell:

At this point, yes, I'm realizing that this was a really easy recipe and the photos are probably really boring. Thank you for staying with me to see how it turns out.

I started out checking it on my finger to see what the consistency was like. It held together pretty well - not too loose, but not glue-y, either.

There's only one problem with getting it on my finger: That meant I really had to taste it. But I couldn't do that without sharing the results, right? (Even though the pie had just gone into the oven.)

(REMINDER: Eating raw eggs and uncooked flour is potentially hazardous to your health. Don't do it.) (And, if you do, at least remember that I warned you.)

Somewhere around mid-bake, I looked in the toaster oven and saw it looking like this: 

Yes, I opened the oven door to take this photo. I know... I know... You keep telling me not to do that...

I was a little freaked out by how dark the top was, but I realize that that was probably due to baking it too high (too close to the top heating elements, etc.) in the toaster oven - not a fault of the pie. At this point, it was actually still obviously liquid under the dark top, so I slid it back in and walked away and trusted in the recipe. 

When I took it out at the end of 50 minutes, it had a slightly domed top as I set it on the rack to cool. 

Hmm... you can probably see the dome better in the toaster oven photo above.

And it almost immediately started to deflate. 

I tried to get a photo of the steam escaping from a crack in the dome, but it didn't turn out. 

By the time it had cooled, it was looking a bit sad, I have to admit. 

Though not as sad as the pup, who apparently felt that the pie smelled like something she should have been sharing.

I left the pie to cool and wait for Book Club. Which got postponed due to... well... due to it being January in Minnesota. But I still wanted to try the pie, obviously. 

It had a really good consistency - and the custardy filling didn't break or weep at all when I took out the first piece (considering how liquid-y the center had looked halfway through the bake time, I was a little worried about that). 

The crust issues were all on me - not the fault of the recipe, obviously.

The flavor wasn't quite as "lemon bar" as it had seemed to me when I tasted the batter before it baked. It was definitely more sweet-vanilla-forward, with the tang of the vinegar just kind of cutting through some of that sweetness.

I ate the whole piece, though, and went back for another one.

Christopher agreed to try a bite of the second one (I guess it seemed safe since I'd already eaten a piece), and he deemed it to be "not bad" - but something he would probably not be asking for more of.

Will I make it again? Probably for whenever my Book Club actually reconvenes to talk about the Little House books.

Would I make it outside of that arena? I'm not sure. I suspect - as you'll see if you read through the TasteofHome.com recipe comments - this is something that you love if you grew up with it, but might take some work to become an acquired taste if you didn't.

Even so, it does take a relatively attractive photo.

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I know that at the end of most blog posts, I ask for your comments, suggestions, and discussion topics. But as I mentioned in the opening video, the amount of weird in the world has been on my mind a lot lately. 

So this week, in response to the devastating Australian wildfires, here's a link to an article in USAToday that lists a whole bunch of relief organizations - some for people, some for animals - if you're so inclined, making a donation to one (or many) of them might be a nice thing to do: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/01/07/australia-fires-how-to-help-donate-victims-animals/2832145001/