Washington's Birthday

It is traditional in my family to eat cherry pie on Washington's Birthday. His birthday is not actually until the 22nd, but we are celebrating it on Presidents Day this year. This pie was made using canned Comstock brand tart cherries (which strangely have a salad recipe on the can rather than a pie recipe). I used this recipe from allrecipes.com (it claims to have been "the 1999 American Pie Council's National Pie Championship first place winner in the Fruit and Berry Category"). Following advice from commenters on the website, I used my own favorite pie crust and reduced the sugar to 3/4 cup. The only unusual things about this recipe are that it calls for 1/4 tsp almond extract, and it has you cook the cherries and sugar in a saucepan for 5 minutes before adding them to the pie.

The pie turned out very will. I certainly would not want any more sugar in it. I added some lemon juice to the filling to make it a bit tarter, but it was still very sweet. I used a short-flake crust rather than the medium-flake crusts I usually use because I the short-flake dough is easier to make into a lattice. It was slightly less flaky, but still flaky enough to be very tasty. The filling would be a lot better with fresh (or fresh frozen) pie cherries. I don't think that cooking the filling in the saucepan beforehand improved the flavor -- instead, I think that the main benefit of pre-cooking the filling a bit is that this way the filling is fully-cooked after 50 minutes and so the crust does not end up as dark as it otherwise would.

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