Pi (e) Day

Guys, I’m super excited for Pi Day. I saw it coming on the calendar so full disclosure, I made today’s recipe on the weekend because as much as I’d like to - there isn’t time to make pie on a Thursday!

Also, I technically made a tart.

I know. I’m just not living up to whatever rules there are for this Math based pun holiday, oh well.

My favourite pie (okay tart) is lemon curd. If that is an option I will order it 100% of the time. So giving my love of citrus and the fact that grapefruits are perfect this time of year I thought I’d try a grapefruit curd tart.

Then, to off set the sweetness of the grapefruit I thought I’d add some pistachios to the crust.

So, the crust was an experiment (I know, baking is supposed to be more precise but it’s not my nature - I’m a fly by the seat of my pants girl) So I took the premise of a traditional 3:2:1 pie dough. Normally I’d do 1 cup flour, half a cup unsalted butter, and then drip in cold water till I got the right consistency.

Today I did 1/3 cup AP flour, 1/3 cup Semola flour (related to semolina but it’s twice milled to a fine consistency, it adds that lovely flavour from the durham wheat), then a used about 1/2 a cup of pistachios that I threw in the vitamix till the reached a nice course grind.

I mixed it all up with some cubed cold butter until it resembled wet sand, then I added a little bit of ice water at a time till the dough came together.

I love the colour of this dough! I also baked of the remaining dough into cookie and topped them with some icing sugar! They were consumed before photo evidence could be provided.

I let the dough rest in the fridge while i put together my curd.

I started by zesting and Juicing 2 grapefruits. I tasted the juice, they were so sweet I decided to reduce the sugar I would usually put into my lemon curd.

I put 2/3 cup of sugar into the mixer with 1/2 cup of unsalted butter and the zest of 1 grapefruit to cream. Once it was thoroughly blended I added 4 eggs, one at a time, until incorporated. Then finally I mixed in 1/2 cup of the grapefruit juice (keep the rest for grapefruit margaritas!).

The mixer looks weird, if you made curd before in the traditional way, adding the eggs last in a pan it will almost look like the mixture is broken. It’s not, the butters is just super cold so it looks separated.

Then put the whole thing into a heavy bottomed sauce pan and heat slowly stirring constantly till it’s thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.

Once it’s set up take it off the heat and transfer into a bowl.

Meanwhile heat the over to 350 and pull out the dough from the fridge. You could roll it out, but for this dough you can also just crumble it into a false bottom tart pan, being careful to get an even layer on the bottom and edges.

Then you need to blind bake it for about 40 minutes until it’s golden brown on the edges.

Then pour in the curd, cover with plastic wrap or parchment paper (to prevent the curd from drying out on top) and leave to set in the fridge for at least 2 hours.

Once it’s set I added a few pistachios in the middle and served.

Then I brought the rest of the pie to work so it wasn’t sitting in my house taunting me.

Happy Pi Day, I hope that your day gets at least 3.141592 3.14159265359 % more awesome!