Peach & Pluot Crostata
Life is short, and stonefruit season is even shorter, so go ahead and make a beautiful crostata and slap some ice cream on there.
You can use a multitude of different stone fruits (apricots! plums! peaches! nectarines!…is that multitudinous enough?), but for this puppy I used 2 free-stone peaches and 1 pluot – which is a hybrid between a plum and apricot, and a favorite of mine.
Make a batch of your favorite pie crust, or fire up a 1/2 batch of Theresa’s Pie Crust.
Depending on whose talking, a “crostata” can mean a lot of different things, and have a lot of different shapes and crusts. Here it’s an open face, free form pie, meaning you don’t need to own a pie plate or any special sort of mold; all you need is a sheet pan to bake it on.
Peach & Pluot Crostata
An easy and beautiful way to make a large stone-fruit pie, without needing a pie plate.
Equipment
- Rolling pin
- Large sheet pan
- Parchment paper
- Pastry brush
Ingredients
- 1/2 batch Theresa's pie crust (link in Notes), or your favorite pie crust recipe for a single-crust pie
- 2 tsp cornstarch
- 1/2 cup white sugar
- 1/4 cup brown sugar
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon
- pinch of salt
- 2 large free-stone peaches
- 1 medium sized pluot
- a few tsps of milk or cream for brushing top of crostata
Instructions
- Prepare pie crust per recipe instructions. Flatten into square, wrap in plastic, and let chill in fridge. Plan on pulling the crust out of the fridge a half-hour before you're ready to assemble the crostata.
- In a large bowl, whisk together cornstarch, sugars, cinnamon and salt. Set aside.
- Using a sharp knife, slice all fruit about 1/4" thick. Place into bowl with cornstarch and sugar, and allow to macerate at room temperature until juicy (at leas 30 minutes, maybe up to an hour.)
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees F/205 celsius. Pull dough out of the fridge to temper, if you haven't yet.
- Once fruit is looking juicy, and your dough is pliable enough to roll out, get ready to assemble the crostata. Lay down a piece of parchment on your work surface, and generously but evenly flour the paper.
- Place dough on paper, and use rolling pin to roll dough to about 1/8" thick. Cut out 10" circle – (save any scrap dough for another project!)
- Transfer paper, with dough, onto sheet pan. Leave a 1-2" border, and start placing fruit slices in center of dough. Make it pretty! Or don't. It's YOUR baby. The larger border you leave, the crustier it will be.
- After all your fruit is out of the bowl and assembled, you'll probably have some sugar + starch goop left in your bowl. Drizzle some of that goop on top of the fruit, but not so much it'll be too wet. Just enough so that the fruit has a little bit more sugar and starch to bake with.
- Start folding up the sides of your crostata, making small pleats, or large folds.Once pleated, pop the sheet pan in the freezer for 15 minutes, until dough is firm but not frozen. (This helps the crostata hold its shape in the oven while baking.)
- Pull crostata out of the freezer, and use pasty brush to lightly wash the dough with milk (or cream.)
- Place in preheated oven, and bake for 15 minutes. Lower temperature of oven to 350F/175C and bake until golden brown and fruit looks cooked, and juices are thick. This will probably take at least 1 more hour or longer. It takes awhile to bake! It's much easier to undrebake this pie than overbake it.
- Once baked, pull crostata from oven, place onto cooling rack, and allow to cool before eating. Serve with vanilla ice cream, for sure. Enjoy!
Notes
- Theresa’s Pie Crust Recipe
- Feel free to sub out other stonefruits with this recipe – it’s a good base recipe to muck about with.
- I made this in late summer, when freestone peaches are ripe (the pits are easy to remove.) This crostata can easily be made with clingstone peaches, which bake up beautifully, but you’ll just need to cut your fruit a little differently, and your slices will look slightly different than mine.