Red and golden raspberry pie, fruit plucked that morning from Shauna’s backyard.

A few days ago, I boarded the ferry to Vashon island to visit Shauna and Danny. She had invited Rebekah Denn (two-time James Beard award winner), Jon Rowley (Saveur Top 100 and contributing editor to Gourmet magazine), and his sweet-as-pie wife Kate McDermott, one of America’s foremost authority on the subject, for an afternoon of gluten-free pie baking. After partaking in the gorgeous lunch Shauna and Danny prepared for us (pasta salad dressed with garlic scape pesto, platters of home-cured gravlax, and hummus and olive dip), we settled in and talked gluten-free pie crusts.

I’m new to gluten-free baking, but Shauna taught me all she could, so I could help her tweak recipes for her next cookbook. We tested three doughs–one made with butter, one with rendered lard from a local farm, and one also with lard, but without egg and sugar. There was a favorite of the night, but I’ll keep that a secret for Shauna’s cookbook.

We produced three pies that day: one raspberry, one Shuksan strawberry/rhubarb, and one cherry. Jon himself was on a ladder for most of the afternoon, picking buckets of cherries from the tree in the backyard, as Danny worked the cherry pitter in the kitchen as fast as he could.

Jon, manning the ladder, picking cherries

And oh, those cherries! They are unlike any other cherry I’ve tasted. Jon said they reminded him of the cherries he tasted in France, and is currently emailing his friend, the estimable Patrica Wells, to see if he can confirm the variety. The cherries are amazing: tarter than Rainers and Bings, with a complex minerality that makes them absolutely addictive. I couldn’t help but dip my fingers in that bowl again and again, savoring each cherry, and slowly eroding away Danny’s hard work.

Danny rolled the crust for the first pie–a golden and red raspberry pie. We gathered around the pies as they cooled, and agreed that there’s something sensual about fruit juice oozing out of the crust. The fruit was thickened by Shauna’s own secret gf flour blend, the very same flour we used for the crust.

“Please sir, may I have some more [pie]?”

the mystery cherry pie awaits its top crust

Jon had brought his refractometer over, a device that measures the amount of sugar in each fruit. He tested each bowl of fruit before announcing approximately how much sugar would be needed to make an appropriately sweet, but not-too-sweet pie filling. (Don’t you wish you had this kind of science at home?) We also nerded out with some refractometer fun after we ate our slices of pie–Kate squeezed some juice out of each Frogs Hollow peach, which we ate and then guessed the number of “brix”, or how much sugar, was in the piece of fruit. Of the five or so peaches we tested, the brix rating ranged from the 13s to the 19s. (The higher the number, the more sugar is present in the fruit.)

I must say, my favorite peach, and Shauna’s too, was the peach that rated in the 16s. The one peach that was the sweetest was ever-so-slightly bruised, and the flavors had begun to ferment slightly. Shauna asked Jon, in all his years of peach tasting, what was the sweetest peach he’s ever encountered. He told us that it was a peach he shared amongst the trees at Frogs Hollow with Jeffrey Steingarten, with an incredible brix reading of 23.

This was one of the most relaxing evenings I’ve had in the last while. I felt the stress knot I’ve carried in my stomach melt away as I watched Kate roll out dough with a familiarity that comes only after years of pie-baking, played with a smiling baby, drank coffee around the table with new friends, stole cherries out of the bowl, spooned up bites of my first gluten-free pie, shared some of the best peaches I’d ever tasted.

Eight hours flew by, the sun dipped low, and it was time to board the ferry back to Seattle.

Thank-you all for a beautiful evening.