Cultivating a Taste for Ground Cherry Pie
Submitted by artfig
Ground cherry pie with a golden, sweet-tart filling thickened with tapioca and lemon juice in a flaky double crust. A rare, old-fashioned treat worth growing your own husk tomatoes for.
YIELD
6 servingsPREP
20 minCOOK
50 minREADY
90 minGround cherries are one of the best-kept secrets in the American garden. Tiny golden fruits wrapped in papery husks, intensely sweet with a low-acid finish that tastes like nothing else.
Also called husk tomatoes, they’re relatives of tomatillos and thrive in the same conditions as regular tomatoes.
This pie showcases them simply: tossed with sugar, a handful of flour, quick-cooking tapioca, and a squeeze of lemon, then baked under a lattice or pricked top crust until the filling bubbles and the pastry turns deep gold.
It’s the kind of recipe you make once every few years when the harvest is generous enough to spare four cups for baking.
Gardener’s Tips
- Ground cherries are ripe when the husks turn dry and papery brown and the fruit inside is golden yellow. Green ones are bitter and not worth picking.
- The plants trail and sprawl, so give them space or let them ramble through taller neighbors. They’ll hide until the other plants die back in fall.
- Tapioca and flour together give the filling body without making it gummy. Don’t skip either one or you’ll end up with a soupy pie.
Ingredients
Directions
Ground cherries also are known as husk tomatoes, and are a smaller, more flavorful cousin of the tomatillo (Physalis ixocarpa) used in Mexican salsa verde.
They’re also related to the Hawaiian poha (Physalis peru viana).
They like the same conditions as tomatoes, and thus will do best in the portions of the Bay Area that stay warmest at night.
However, if you can grow tomatoes, you can grow ground cherries, and they’re worth a try.
They always pull their disappearing act if grown among other plants.
They like to drape their long trailing branches over their neighbors’ leaves, and run down among long grasses.
Only becoming visible when the other plants die back late in the year They set fruit sparingly until mid- season, when they finally produce large clusters of fruit that develop inside greenish husks. These dry when ripe to a lacy brown paper. The fruits are green and unpalatable until ripe, when they turn a rich golden yellowish brown. Small But Sweet: The fruits are the size of blueberries, and are intensely sweet with a low acid finish. They’re surprisingly savory and good for preserves, although I prefer them in a once-every-five-years version of ground cherry pie. Plant the seeds in the spring in an out-of-the-way part of the garden and make sure the area is not allowed to undergo severe water stress. Directions: Gently mix together ground cherries, sugar, tapioca, flour and lemon juice. Let stand for 15 minutes while you line a 9-inch pie pan with half of the pastry. Preheat the oven to 450 F. Turn the fruit, mixture into the pastry- lined pan, and dot the top with the butter. Cover with a well-pricked top crust or lattice work of dough. Bake at 450F for 10 minutes, then reduce the heat to 350℉ (180℃) and bake for another 40 minutes, or until golden brown.
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