The 2024 edition of Good Food's PieFest & Contest has a few new categories, including one just for berry pies. It's a large grouping with plenty of variety — strawberry, blueberry, blackberry, raspberry, marionberry, mulberry, cloudberry, gooseberry, huckleberry, elderberry, lingonberry, olallieberry, boomberry, etc. You get the idea.
But berries can be tricky. Nobody knows that like Clémence De Lutz, the founder of the Gourmandise School in Santa Monica. What does she recommend for making the best berry pies?
"There are three ways that I think about berry pies," De Lutz says. "One of them is a pre-cooked filling. Another one would be cooking the berries into the pie but not pre-cooking the filling. And the third is the idea of a fresh berry pie. The thing I think about is the Marie Callender's fresh strawberry pie where you're piling the fruit into a pre-baked crust and you have this matrix of goop. It sounds unappetizing but it's very delicious."
De Lutz takes a deep dive into the pros and cons of each method.
PSA: Cherries are not berries. They're stone fruit. Don't enter them into the Berry category at PieFest!
This berry pie was plate-licking good. Photo by Clémence De Lutz.