Cherry Pie. 2.15.22

I bought myself a present, a marble rolling pin. Today I used it to make crust for a cherry pie.

I learned some things. Pretty good, since I started baking pies after I returned from Army service, which would be about 1978. I still have the rolling pin I bought for that, plus my mom's, plus her mom's which is birds eye maple but doesn't roll well any more because the handles are stuck. Nobody needs four rolling pins, but it adds up to about one per decade. The marble pin works very nicely. The heaviness makes it noticably easier on my back, to roll out the crust. I still need to use a pastry cloth on the rolling pin, to keep the crust from sticking. The other thing I learned is that I like flour better as thickener for tart cherry pie, compared to starch (Clear Jel). The flour seems to reduce the acidity a bit.

Not related to the pie, but I learned something else. I also made a pizza, using Roma tomato sauce that I canned last summer. The canning process requires adding lemon juice as a preservative. That makes for too sour tomato sauce for me. What I learned is, if I add about 1/4 tsp baking soda per pint of tomato sauce before spreading it on the pizza crust, it's not nearly as sour and I liked that quite a lot. That's good because then I can can more next year, which means it won't take up freezer space.