Recipe - Japanese Fruit Pie

This pie is a family tradition, always present at Christmas and Thanksgiving. It is similar to a Pecan Pie, but with a little more body.

Ingredients

• 1 frozen pie shell
• 1 stick of butter, melted
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vinegar (Apple Cider type is best)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• ¹⁄₂ cup raisins (gold or regular)
• ¹⁄₂ cup chopped nuts (normally use pecans)
• ¹⁄₂ cup coconut (shredded)

Directions

Blind bake the 9” pie shell, according to the package instructions. The pie is really moist and without this step, the crust doesn’t get done. The trick with blind baking is not burning the outer crust, when you finish the bake with the filling. You either don’t bake the crust as much, or use a Pie Crust Shield. Also be carefuly to watch the sides of the pie crust, as they tend to slide into the pie tin. I hand crimp the edges down, after thawing the frozen pie shell. (This also makes it look more like you made the shell too. Is that cheating?)

• Fully mix melted butter and sugar
• Mix in vinegar, vanilla, eggs (make sure butter isn’t too hot, you don’t want to cook the eggs)
• Add the raisins, nuts and coconut and mix until uniform
• Dump everything into the pie shell and level it out.
• Bake at 300 degrees for 40-50 minutes. The top should be uniformly browned and the center firm.

Notes

While this pie is great the day it is baked, it gets better if put inside a gallon sized ziploc freezer bag and frozen. Something with the freezing of the pie makes the flavors meld together better. For a really handy pie, cut it before freezing. Then you can grab it out of the freezer and take it when you need to bring a dessert. The pie is really hard to cut when frozen, but the pieces get soft very quickly when served. The pie doesn’t loose its flavor even after a few months in the deep freeze.

Variations

The important parts of the recipe are the butter, sugar and egg. Just like a pecan pie, the egg cooks and gels the pie together. I tend to like a little more coconut than the recipe and a little more pecans. Variations on fruit such as dried cherries instead of raisins are interesting.

I have also made this into a bar with a flat dough on parchment paper that it blind baked, then a layer of the filling on top. Let cool for a while before cutting. These turned out well and were a smaller portion of this rich dessert.