My Own Bing Overload — Fail!
The Pits
Cooking is a series of trials and tribulations. I think . When meals get boring, when it’s just the same old thing, that’s a red flag that says … it’s time to step out of the box, take chances and try something new. So, this morning I did. Well, sorta. I have made plenty of fruit pies, tarts, crumbles, cobblers and crumbs in my life, but cherry is not one of them. I use peaches, nectarines, apples and plums. The long and the short of it … the acidity in those fruits is an important aspect of what the end result will be.
Today I decided I needed to use the 1lb. bag of cherries I was so excited to be able to purchase for just $1.99 and I set out to make a cherry pie.
It felt like hours of my life were taken pitting the cherries. The cherry/olive pitter did a fabulous job, but it was my fear of leaving a pit in the pie that made me spend more time rooting around looking for errant pits and in the end, I cut each cherry in half to eliminate the potential tooth-breaking disaster. We were pit free!
The pie looked incredible! Structurally, it worked well. So what’s the problem, you ask? The TASTE! It was off. Really off!
What could have been the problem? These Bings look luscious, don’t they? They’re dark and shiny and juicy. How could this pie be anything but Bing perfection?
Even the dough was a breeze. Well, that is once I realized I needed two batches of dough so that I could have a shell and a top layer. I’d started out cutting strips to make a lattice top, but quickly abandoned the idea. I just didn’t have the brain this morning to make it work beautifully, so I got out last fall’s leaf cutters. I mean, these cherries do come from a tree, ya know! Remember George and the problem he had with chopping down a cherry tree? It’s part of the whole, “I can not tell a lie” thing that has me here writing about a pie that tasted so … wrong … that it ended up in the trash. After all that work, no less.
But I need to be honest with you. I have had my food flops in the two-plus years I’ve been cooking/writing/broadcasting food prep and I’ve always shared my disasters with you, so today is no different.
It’s just sad. Look how beautiful this pie looks! So pretty!
So we still have the unanswered question — why did it taste to wrong? I didn’t use sour cherries. This was the first time I used cherries and Bing cherries are just too sweet, not enough acidity. It was very flat — actually, it tasted round to me. I don’t know what that means! It’s just what came to mind when I thought of the taste. There was simply no pucker. This pie needed more tart and less sweet. And just like Microsoft’s new Bing, this pie looked pretty, was draped in promises, but delivered nothing. It was empty.
Well, it did look pretty! : )
What a shame because the pie certainly looks very very pretty!
I think i could have liked the screen staring at it……..Sure does prove looks are deceiving..
@dezining4u It’s sad, isn’t it?
My heart goes out to you.
Great post, but the reason it flopped is because all baking recipes should us the Montmorency tart cherries and not bing, sweet or any other type of cherry. But tart cherries are hard to find that is why I only buy mine from a Michigan-based farm called Traverse Bay Farms. I buy 25 pounds of tart cherries, pit them and freeze them so I can bake all year long. Here is a link if you are interested http://www.traversebayfarms.com