Fresh Strawberry Pie

Capture the essence of strawberry season with this Fresh Strawberry Pie! Perfectly ripe berries are sliced up and "set" in homemade strawberry sauce, placed in a buttery sweet biscuit-like crust, and glazed for the prettiest Strawberry Pie ever.

The Best Strawberry Pie

This is the pie to make when you get back from strawberry picking and you've already eaten as many as you can fresh from the fields. This pie is the ultimate celebration of strawberry season, one that relies and emphasizes the natural sweetness of freshly picked strawberries.

Sweet strawberries are sliced up, and "set" within a buttery sweet pie crust using a simple homemade strawberry gelatin, then glazed and served with whipped cream. It gives off strawberry shortcake vibes, but in a stunning pie.

What Makes this Recipe Stand Out

Strawberry season is so magical! I'll never forget the first time I tasted a locally grown strawberry when I was in college. Strange to think that my whole childhood, I had only ever tasted grocery store strawberries, but it wasn't until I was in my 20's that I had my first brush with a farm fresh berry and not to get hyperbolic, but it really changed my life. I had never tasted something so nuanced, so flavorful and so sweet. I wanted this recipe to be a celebration of that.

That meant that the recipe really needed to let the strawberries shine, without any interfering flavors or textures.

Some recipes for Fresh Strawberry Pie call for the use of strawberry jello, or a thickener like cornstarch. When developing this recipe, I knew that wasn't the approach I wanted to take. After playing around with a few different thickeners, I settled on the idea of making a quick homemade strawberry sauce with gelatin. The use of gelatin provides the right traditional consistency for this pie, without making the filling cloudy or too gummy, allowing the clean and bright strawberry flavor to shine through.

It was also important to keep the berries as intact and uncooked as possible. After all, it is a Fresh Strawberry Pie. So instead of cooking all the fruit on the stove, the sliced strawberries are instead folded into the strawberry gelatin and allowed to set.

Choosing the right crust was important too. To enhance the texture and taste of the strawberry pie, I wanted the crust to be just slightly soft and relatively thick to withstand the somewhat dense and heavy filling. Plus, it also needed to be sweet and buttery. I like to think of this crust as almost a biscuit pie pastry hybrid. It adds to the overall taste and enjoyment of the pie, without stealing the limelight from the strawberries.

So, let's get to making it, shall we? The text below offers tons of tips and helpful notes, or you can scroll to the bottom to grab the recipe and get started!

Ingredients Needed

Here is an overview of the ingredients needed for this recipe. The full recipe is listed below in greater detail.

• strawberries (buy the best you can find--see more on this below!)
• all-purpose flour
• powdered sugar
• salt
• baking powder
• unsalted butter
• egg
• whole milk
• granulated gelatin (see section "Using Gelatin" for more info)
• vanilla + almond extract
• lemon
• heavy cream

Let's Talk Strawberries

Many of us have access to strawberries year round. But we all know that year-round strawberries are a different thing than in-season and local berries.

Local varieties tend to be smaller in size, but pack so much more flavor in. They also usually have a much brighter vibrant red color throughout the strawberry. Though the sweetness may vary depending on the local climate during the growing season.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, the quality of the strawberry used in this recipe will significantly impact the final outcome. If you use tasteless watery berries, your pie will be watery and tasteless.

Additionally, it's important to actually taste your strawberries before starting the recipe. If they are very tart (which sometimes can happen), a bit more sugar can be added in to the strawberry sauce.

Useful Tools to Make this Recipe

• food processor (to make the pie dough) or a stand mixer
• 9" pie tin
• rolling pin
• parchment paper + pie weights (dried rice / beans work really well for this!)
• knife + cutting board
• immersion blender or small blender
• sauce pan
• kitchen essentials: baking scale, bowls, measuring cups and measuring spoons, rubber spatula

Making the Pie Crust

The pie crust in this recipe is a sweet pie crust that is almost a hybrid between a pie crust and a biscuit. It has a bit of baking powder in it to give it some puff, and some milk and an egg added to it to give it some heft. It's very stable and holds up well in the refrigerator. Because the filling is so heavy, a studier pie crust felt like the right move, and one that could stand up and complement the filling.

This soft but sturdy pie crust gives this pie some strawberry shortcake vibes, especially when paired with a big dollop of whipped cream.

The crust is made in a food processor and does not typically need to be chilled before you can roll it out. If however your kitchen is very warm and you find the dough too soft, simply refrigerate it for about 15 minutes before rolling it out.

It does need to be blind baked since the filling is no-bake.

If you don't want to make this sweet pastry pie crust, you could possibly make a Graham Cracker Crumb Crust, though it won't hold up quite as well as the sweet pastry pie crust.

I would not suggest using a flaky pie crust for this pie, since it will be served cold. But if you really want to, you can use this Butter Pie Crust recipe.

Using Gelatin

Gelatin is concentrated animal protein derived from collagen. It is not a vegetarian product. Gelatin can come granulated or in "sheets". In grocery stores, most unflavored gelatine comes packaged in pre-measured .25-ounce envelopes, but it can also be purchased in 16-ounce containers online.

This recipe was tested with regular store-bought Knox brand gelatin. I did not test this with sheet gelatin.

Gelatin must be dissolved before it can work its magic. Dissolving it is a (simple) two-step process:

• Separate the granules
• Melt them

First the gelatin granules must be separated so they can properly dissolve. This is typically done by hydrating them with a cold liquid so the granules swell. This is also called blooming the gelatin.

Once the granules are hydrated they need to be melted, usually by adding a hot liquid to them. After the granules are fully melted and dissolved into the liquid, they uniformly disperse and begin to form a network as the mixture cools down. This process is known as gelation, and it occurs when the protein chains from the gelatin bond together and form a network that traps or “gels” the liquid.

In this Strawberry Pie recipe, this process looks like adding water to bloom the gelatin granules, and then the strawberry sauce mixture is heated and poured over the bloomed granules to dissolve them.

Assembling the Filling

If you’ve ever made jello, you’ll likely know it is simple to prepare. But if you haven’t, it might some unfamiliar enough to seem difficult.

If that’s you, read through the instructions a few times and familiarize yourself with the method and trust me when I say it’s a relatively straightforward preparation, and a lot easier than a lot of other pie fillings out there.

In short, the filling consists of raw strawberries tossed together with a homemade strawberry jello. Once the gelatin sets, it will hold the strawberry filling in place.

To make the strawberry gelatin, some strawberries are pureed and cooked with sugar until it boils, and then gelatin is added in.

Once the filling is assembled it will take about 4-6 hours for it fully to set up.

To Glaze or Not to Glaze

Whether or not you want to glaze your Strawberry Pie is a serious question! There are some who are adamantly anti-glaze. But it's hard to deny how beautiful those strawberries look with a bright sheen on them.

The glaze is also helpful to keep the strawberries fresher longer, though regardless it's best to consume this pie shortly after it finishes setting up, about a day or two at most.

The glaze is simple. It's made from heated and strained strawberry preserves or jam, that has a bit of water added to it to make it possible to brush it onto the fruit.

Perfect Whipped Cream

You should really top this pie with whipped cream, spiked with a bit of vanilla extract and sugar. Strawberries and cream are a perfect combination.

Make the whipped cream right before serving. Or, if you are looking to prep it ahead of time, make stabilized whipped cream from this Chocolate Cream Pie recipe.

Serving and Storing Fresh Strawberry Pie

Fresh Strawberry Pie should be served fresh. Not only do ripe strawberries have a short shelf-life, but also, they will begin to leak out some liquid as it sits in the gelatin.

Serve Fresh Strawberry Pie within a day (or two, at most) after it has finished setting up. Serve it cold or at room temperature with a big dollop of whipped cream.

More Strawberry Recipes

• Strawberry Cobbler
• Strawberry Icebox Cake
• Strawberry Pie Filling
• Cherry and Strawberry Slab Pie

I am so honored when you make a recipe from my site! If you make this Fresh Strawberry Pie, please leave a comment and a star rating with your experience! If you have any questions about this recipe, feel free to comment here, too!

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