Blueberry Lemon Pie

Sometimes you walk into a market and your eyes spot something so beautiful, so enticing, you know you have to have them. Baskets of gigantic blueberries were staring back at me and I knew this was my opportunity to make my favorite, blueberry lemon pie. How these huge, luscious blueberries survived my snacking long enough to make it into this pie is the real mystery here.

This is a take on my friend Gretchen’s mother’s blueberry pie recipe. Cooked, the challenge as always is…will the fruit be soft enough to be called a pie. It’s easy to just throw fruit into a crust, which you most certainly can do, but I encourage you to put it into the dehydrator to amplify the flavor and to allow the juice to drip into a delicious syrup that pools at the bottom while softening.

Often people ask me what they should do if they don’t have a dehydrator. If you don’t want to bake/cook anything, you can, as I said above, just throw it all in. Nothing “has” to be dehydrated in this recipe, it just makes it feel more like what you’re used to when someone says “blueberry pie”.

*This recipe is for a mini pie, Marie and I ate too many blueberries to make anything larger.

RAW VEGAN RECIPE: Blueberry Lemon Pie

Crust

2 pitted soaked dates

1 cup almond meal

dash cinnamon

Mix cinnamon and almond meal together, mash in dates and mold into a spring form pie pan. Place into dehydrator at 115 degrees for 6 hours.

Blueberry Filling

1 cup blueberries

1/8 cup filtered water

2 tblsps raw sugar (optional)

Toss blueberries in water (and sugar) and place in the dehydrator at 115 degrees for 6-10 hours depending on how soft you want your berries, tossing occasionally.

Lemon Syrup

1 lemon juiced

2 tblsps raw sugar pulverized

1/2 tsp lemon zest

Mix ingredients together and place in the dehydrator at 115 degrees for 3-5 hours, checking occasionally. You want syrup and once it cools it will get hard. If that happens you can place back in the dehydrator or add a tiny bit of any excess blueberry juice or filtered water to loosen it up.

Pie

Place blueberries into the crust. Take left over juice and mix it with the lemon syrup. Drizzle it over the blueberries and add zest as garnish.