One of our closest friends are vegan so it is a fun challenge to have them over for dinner. I still have frozen rhubarb from another friend who lives in the countryside so decided that the sour cherry rhubarb combination was so good it needed to be repeated, but this time without my all butter crust.
Following Rose Beranbaum’s vegetable shortening recipe in her book I made a shortening based crust. I much prefer the flavour of butter to shortening’s lack of flavour, but shortening has some positive attributes as well. It is softer at fridge temperature so starts to roll out extremely well right out of the fridge. It also doesn’t melt on you as easily as you roll it out and handle the dough. It browns more quickly than butter based pastry which is a positive or a negative as long as you are aware of this. Despite shielding the edge of the crust after it was par-baked, fill and topped it still ended up more brown with slight bitterness I associate with over baked crust edge. In the future, I’d shield it even soon maybe even right from the start of par-baking. Finally it can make a flaky crust if you give the dough enough folds, but it easily is much more tender than an all butter crust.
For the streusel topping, I used a vegan butter. Once again I missed the flavour of butter in the topping, however, the streusel’s flavour had hints of butter in it from the vegan butter. I browned nicely without over baking.
Final note to self, when pre-cooking the filling there is no need to fully heat and fully thicken it. I would probably just cook until it just starts to thicken and leave it loose as it will fully cook in the oven in the pie.
I added some almond extract to the filling along with lemon juice, both these additions really enhanced the pie. As you know almond and cherry go extremely well together so a bit of almond extract just makes the cherry sing without making itself been known. Lemon juice is almost always a positive from making fruit pies sing that that is no different there.
I’m with Abe, the pie looks fantastic. I was a vegan for five years, and I would have loved a slice of your pie. Now, I’m about 80 - 90% vegan, and would still love it. However, I think I would love any of your lovely pies.
Richard
Thank you Richard, I’m not vegan but I do enjoy making vegetarian and vegan meals for us on a regular basis. I wish I could bake a pie and share it with you guys, that way I don’t eat half a pie myself!
Benny
That looks amazing! Did you use Crisco for the shortening? Any rec on the vegan butter? I’m utterly confused by hydrogenated oil/trans fat substitutes.
Edited: I tried to answer my own question lol. Nowadays shortening has oils that are fully hydrogenated to make them solid at room temp, so no trans fats, and then they are mixed with oil to soften things up – this combining process is called interesterification and there’s some mixed research on the good and bad of that thus far, and the research doesn’t seem to be vs. butter or oil, which would be more informative …for a baker who’s going to use one thing or another no matter what
I haven’t seen much in the way of new research looking at the health effects of how they are making the new shortenings. At this time, my preference since we don’t know for sure it to use a fat that has benefits for flavour and or texture. So this time I used Crisco vegetable shortening but my preference is still butter.
For the streusel I used Miyoko’s vegan butter. It is surprisingly decent tasting having a mild buttery margarine like flavour and a nice enough texture. If I were vegan I would consider using it at times for baking. It certainly worked well making a nicely flavoured streusel. But again, the first ingredient is coconut oil which is high in saturated fat. So I would prefer butter if I’m going to have saturated fat since it actually tastes like butter.
Thank you for replying with your approach to using these fats. So far I’ve found that replacing butter with light olive oil or avocado oil works great in breads and some cookies, but not so much in flaky crusts.
I’ve also heard good things about the flavor and performance of Miyoko spread.
I love coconut milk/fat in curries, but like you, tend to prefer butter flavor in pie crusts.
Look how flaky that crust is! The browned edges are an attribute in my mind as I love the slight bitterness in contrast to the the tart filling. We used to gobble it up as kids when the edges of my mom’s Crisco crusts used to over-brown a bit. The streusel topping looks very nice indeed. I’m sure your friend was touched by your effort and highly impressed at the result. Nice work.
–AG
It is the third vegan meal I have made for this couple both of whom are vegan. I should have posted about the lemon meringue tart I made for them last time. Thanks for your comments AG, I appreciate them.
Benny
