Make the most of strawberry rhubarb season with the best strawberry rhubarb pie you’ve ever had! Perfectly sweet, a buttery crust, and just the right ratio of strawberry to rhubarb. 

THE INGREDIENTS: 

The Pie Crust: 

Flour: Flour is the foundation of a flaky pie crust. Without it the crust would have no structure, after all. You don’t need any special variety of flour for pie crust-all purpose will get you that tender, flaky crust you’re probably already thinking about right now.

We do not recommend increasing the amount of flour in this recipe. We already took into consideration that quite a few pie crust recipes just don’t make enough to leave you with the ability to get that cute fluted design on your pie. With 3 cups of all purpose flour, you should be good to go. In addition to that, a really important hallmark of a good pie crust is that the dough is not overly moist. So, ours isn’t! If you were to increase the flour, we do not believe the dough could successfully come together with the liquid amounts stated in our recipe. 

Butter: When we think flaky, two things come to mind: pie crust and croissants. Want to know a common denominator there? Lots (and we mean LOTS) of butter. So, two sticks is a lot, we really understand, but this is not the right recipe when it comes to reducing the amount of butter! The more you replace butter with another fat, the more you sacrifice precious flakiness. We personally don’t have shortening in our pantry, so we cannot recommend a good ratio of butter to shortening in a pie crust. Go for an all butter pie crust, you may not want to ever turn back! 

Salt: It may seem insignificant, but salt adds a smidge of flavor to this pie crust. Maybe you wouldn’t put your finger on it, but without it, you could easily feel like something is “missing”. Personally, we’d rather be enjoying our pie than wondering at why it just isn’t as good! So, don’t take the risk and add the salt to this pie crust. 

Sugar: With a filling that could easily have 1 cup of white sugar, what would this little tablespoon even do for your pie? No matter how sweet the filling is, that sweetness doesn’t transfer directly into the crust-even if a little juice seeps in. To give more flavor to the crust, this one tablespoon really goes a long way! Like the salt, it may not be a main ingredient, but its small contribution just helps make the pie crust so much better. 

Cold Water: Don’t fret if you don’t have ice cubes on hand! Pie dough can still successfully be made with cold water, which is exactly what we do in this recipe. The easier the recipe, the quicker the pie is in your mouth, after all. What we’re trying to get at here is you don’t have to be scared about making pie. It’s not actually as exact of a science as you may think. Even though we have so much butter, we don’t melt it, meaning the crust can’t come together with just solid fat and dry ingredients alone. It’s very easy to go from “too dry” to “soggy mess”, so make sure to add your water slowly! Also, try to spread it throughout your dough, as putting too much water in one spot will make it harder to redistribute that moisture across the pie crust. 

The Strawberry Rhubarb Pie: 

Strawberries: You can’t have a strawberry rhubarb pie without strawberries! We say a pint is the perfect amount to add. The strawberries are very present, but not at the expense of completely overwhelming the rhubarb. We’ve made this pie before without slicing the strawberries, just hulling them. Even though that works, we have found that slicing the strawberries yields a better texture. Also, some strawberries are sweeter than the others. So, whole strawberries would give bites with inconsistent sweetness. Pie filling never has to be perfectly precise, so if you’re a few strawberries short or over, that’s completely fine. 

Rhubarb: You also can’t have a strawberry rhubarb pie without rhubarb! Rhubarb may not be a sweet fruit like a strawberry is, but that tartness is a good thing. It balances out the natural flavor of the strawberries and honestly takes them to the next level. Without rhubarb’s tartness, we say this pie would be too sweet. Rhubarb stalks vary quite a bit in size, so to get 2 heaping cups means you can use anywhere from 4 to 6 stalks. We are never too accurate on what defines “heaping”, but usually it’s somewhere around an extra ¼ cup. As long as you use between 2 and 2 ½ cups of rhubarb we say there is nothing to worry about. 

White Sugar: Strawberries may be sweet, but that doesn’t mean pie should be sugar free! Sugar helps to make our strawberries extra juicy and extra sweet. Without them, the filling would be closer to cooked rhubarb and strawberries instead of that juicy goodness you want. We say go for white sugar here instead of brown sugar because the molasses flavor of brown sugar does not pair well here. It would muddy up the strawberry rhubarb flavor.

We’ve often used grocery store strawberries and farmer’s market rhubarb in our pies. One thing about grocery store strawberries is that they just aren’t as sweet as home grown. Not even close. So if you are using home grown or farmer’s market strawberries, you may want to reduce the amount of sugar in this pie to 1 cup, even ¾! For our gardeners, we recommend going with 1 cup the first time and adjusting from there.  

Flour: Flour is absolutely crucial in a pie recipe. Without it, you’d have soup inside a pie crust. With too much, you’d have a gummy paste as a filling. We’ve tried out different ratios of flour so you don’t have to. Hear us out: the answer is ½ cup of flour, no more or no less. There’s nothing watery or gummy about this pie. We use all purpose flour, and recommend you use the same. This is no time to break out the wheat flour! Other flours would most likely impart an odd taste or texture, although we can’t stop you from experimenting. 

Salt: A pinch of salt helps you appreciate the sweetness! We use ¼ tsp, but up to ½ a tsp would work just fine in this recipe! Adjust as you like. 

KEY INFORMATION: 

Does Butter Have To Be Cut In Pea Sized Pieces For Pie Crust?  Although many recipes say to get out the utensils and cut the butter in your flour until you have pea sized pieces, you don’t have to! In fact, this step is what prevented us from wanting to make homemade pie for quite some time.

While that method works, you can also slice your butter into thin rectangular pats before even adding it to the flour. To start, you add a little water (but not enough) to your flour and mix. Then, you add the butter and press each pat quite thin in the flour mixture. It’s fine if some breaks or some pieces stay a bit large! Then, you transfer that dry, crumbly dough to a large piece of parchment paper. You dribble a bit of water across the whole surface and then lift the parchment so you are folding the pie dough. Repeat this many times and the water distributes itself across the whole dough, so you don’t need too much! Add more water as you go, of course.

We learned this from an old King Arthur Baking video, but have adjusted it so the overall recipe is different and we don’t use a spray bottle to distribute our water. After all, not many households have a cooking spray bottle on hand! 

Does Pie Crust Need To Be Refrigerated? Yes! We recommend refrigerating pie crust at least 2 hours before working with it. In fact, leaving it overnight would be even better. As pie crust chills in the fridge, the dough reaches a uniform moisture level. This makes it easier for rolling, as you won’t have some parts too wet and some too dry. If you roll your pie crust without resting it, you may also find that it crumbles and cracks a lot as you roll. If you’re working somewhere warm, a chill also rehardens the butter. This makes for quite the flaky crust! 

Help! My Pie Crust Is Too Crumbly. We learned this tip to help with crumbly pie crust from an old King Arthur Baking video, but have adjusted it so the overall recipe is different and we don’t use a spray bottle to distribute our water. After all, not many households have a cooking spray bottle on hand!

Slice your butter into thin rectangular pats before even adding it to the flour. To start, you add a little water (but not enough) to your flour and mix. Then, you add the butter and press each pat quite thin in the flour mixture. It’s fine if some breaks or some pieces stay a bit large! Then, you transfer that dry, crumbly dough to a large piece of parchment paper. You dribble a bit of water across the whole surface and then lift the parchment so you are folding the pie dough. Repeat this many times and the water distributes itself across the whole dough, so you don’t need too much! Add more water as you go, of course. 

Is It Necessary to Dot Pie With Butter? It is not necessary to dot a pie with butter. So if your pie is sealed up and about to go in the oven when you’ve realized, fret not! Just put it in and bake it. Butter is said to do several things for pies, such as reducing boil overs, being necessary for a juicy filling, and as an ingredient that adds richness.

However, we’ve made pies. Some dotted with butter, some not. Pie crust is already so buttery and the flavor of fruit is so strong that we can’t taste the difference between a dotted pie and one that isn’t dotted. So, we don’t think you need it for richness! Our fillings are also plenty juicy, so we don’t need butter for that reason, either. Finally, boil overs? Why would butter stop that? If your pie boils over, the steam in your pie dough hasn’t been able to escape, so it causes all sorts of problems. Adding holes to the top of your pie before baking helps with this. Even if you don’t (we forget sometimes), this pie has only boiled over just a teeny bit for us. 

Is It Necessary to Mix the Fruit With the Flour and Sugar First? Yes! We’ve heard of two methods for pies. The first is coating the fruit in the flour, sugar, and salt mixture. The second is adding in ½ of the fruit, topping it with half of the flour, sugar, and salt mixture, adding the other ½ of the fruit, and topping it with the other half of the flour, sugar, and salt mixture. We’ve also tried both. We don’t know if the second method is tradition or perhaps better for other pies, but it just doesn’t work for strawberry rhubarb. The pie is too soggy that way! 

What Goes With Strawberry Rhubarb Pie? Vanilla ice cream or whipped cream are common toppings! You’ll want something soft and cold to go with this pie. You could even make vanilla pudding! Other flavors of ice cream or pudding will also work, but you don’t want to cover up the flavor of the pie. Try sweet cream ice cream, plain ice cream with honey swirls, strawberry ice cream, or strawberry rhubarb ice cream so it brings out the best of the pie instead of covering it up. We also frequently eat it plain.