It might sound strange, but it's good!
Ingredients
5 big onions (Vidalia works best, in my opinion)
1 stick of butter (unsalted)
Salt
Thyme (dried is fine)
1 lemon, zested and juiced
1 pie crust (pre-made is ok)
1 egg
Milk
Bay leaves
Bleu cheese (I used this one)
Arugula
Procedure:
Melt the stuck of butter in a wide, shallow pan with a lid on medium/medium-low heat. Add bay leaves. Slice the onions into strips, not rings. Toss the onions in the melted butter and salt, liberally. Add the juice and zest of one lemon and thyme, to taste. Cover the onions until the onions begin to sweat, but make sure the onions do not brown, tossing onions every 5 minutes or so. Adjust heat if necessary. Remove the cover and cook until onions begin to take on color (this could take a while, like an hour or so). Once the onions begin to caramelize, lower the heat a bit and re-cover the pan, making sure to move the onions every few minutes to prevent burning. Once the onions are the preferred depth of brown, remove from the heat. The onions should be moist, but not wet.
Press the bottom crust into a 9-inch pie plate and scatter bleu cheese crumbles across the bottom. Add the onions and scatter the remaining bleu cheese crumbles on top. Add the top pie crust and seal the edges with a fork, or by crimping and remove the excess with a knife. Beat 1 egg and a little milk together to make an egg-wash and coat the top pie crust with a thin layer of egg wash, using a pastry brush. Make sure to poke some holes for steam to escape. Bake the pie in a 425F oven until the pie is golden brown. To prevent excessive browning of the crust, cover it with a 1-2 inch wide strip of aluminum foil, 10 minutes into baking. When the pie is done, allow it to rest for at least 10 minutes. Serve with arugula.
Tomato Pie is one of my favorite things. Never had one that compares to how they make it back home though.
Oh you know, stuff like this. Tomato pie is served at room temp at warmest, it's often serve below that. It's the only kind I know since it's what I grew up with, small squares of more or less dough with a sweet sauce on it. It's somewhat difficult to distinguish from pizza aside from the lack of cheese and thicker nature of it to someone who hasn't had both extensively. Apparently Philly tomato pie is similar to Utica tomato pie, and I'm having a damn hard time finding any good recipes online right now for it, but something like this or as follows is pretty close:
Tomato Pie Recipe 3 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil 2 cloves garlic 1 28-to-32-oz. can crushed tomatoes 1 tsp. dried oregano salt and pepper to taste 1 lb. pizza dough 3 tbsp. grated Pecorino Romano cheese Preheat oven to 450°F. Stretch the pizza dough to cover a greased cookie sheet.
Dough should be fairly thick (about 3/4 inch). Allow the dough to rise a bit while
the sauce is cooking. Heat a saucepan on medium, add the olive oil and garlic, and
sauté until the garlic is just golden. Add crushed tomatoes and oregano. Cook until
the sauce is thickened, about 15-20 minutes. Cool the sauce to room temperature. Top
the pizza dough with the sauce and then bake in 450°F oven for about 15-20 minutes.
After removing the pie from the oven, sprinkle with the cheese. Let the pie cool to
room temperature before eating. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The original makers of this delicious tomato pie also added (2) tablespoons of sugar for each 32 oz. of crushed tomatoes.
This supposedly removed the slight bitterness taste of the tomato sauce. Now I'm going to have to give my mom and call and snag her recipe.
Have you tried cooking this with beer? I made beer onions the other day. I am clearly experimenting with beer. I am mostly just curious. I (sadly for this recipe) am not very fond of bleu/blue cheese. But otherwise this looks really interesting. Thanks for sharing.
No, but that would be good. If using beer I'd use white onions instead unless the sweetness really worked with the beer. A dry cider would probably be good too. It would probably help to caramelize the onions more than I did to make sure that the onions aren't too wet to go into the pie shell. If it is wet, you can blind bake the bottom crust in the pie plate and put some of the cheese on the bottom so the onion juices don't soak through. Bleu cheese isn't necessary: you could use any strong cheese, like a very sharp cheddar or provolone.