Easy Gluten-Free Strawberry-Blueberry Pie

A Simple Strawberry-Blueberry Pie 

Last Updated: 12/10/2020

If you’re new to gluten-free baking, here’s a simple strawberry-blueberry pie that only takes a few minutes to throw together.

When Gluten-Free Girl announced her intention to throw an internet-based pie party on July 4, 2011, I just had to opt in. Not only because I have a few great pie recipes from which to choose, but because my husband and I absolutely love pie! 

It’s one of our favorite desserts. 

Pie tends to scare a lot of folks, though. So the idea of a posting party (where a single day was set aside for gluten-free bloggers to talk about pie and their experiences making one) was to help us practice. 

It was also to help us learn to live with our mistakes, and especially – to not be afraid to blog about them.

I love it when food bloggers talk about what went wrong with a particular recipe, whether they know why or not. It helps us readers decide whether to try the recipe ourselves, what not to do if we choose to charge ahead, and what not to waste our time experimenting with. 

So that’s what I’m going to do today.

My Gluten-Free Pie Crust Mistakes

June of 2011 was a particularly bad month for us. The lawnmower broke, my toaster broke, my car broke down leaving me stranded at the grocery store, and our city council decided to spray us four times in two weeks with Malathion – to try and get rid of the mosquitoes. 

(It didn’t work by the way. It just made us sick. We still got eaten alive that year.)

A pie party raised special issues for us. 

If I wanted to participate, I had to use whatever gluten-free ingredients I already had in the house. 

We didn’t have money for any extras. 

While our favorite all-time dessert is a pineapple-coconut pie, I went with a red-white-and-blue Fourth-of-July tradition, and used an easy strawberry pie recipe I’d picked up from one of my low-carb forums several years ago.

(That forum no longer exists.)

But first, let's talk about the crust. It didn’t quite come out as planned. 

I take a lot of time tweaking my recipes to make them the best they can be, and stepping outside of my final creation generally results in some kind of failure. But I hadn’t made a pie in a very long time, and I’d already opted in when I got deathly ill from the Malathion. 

And, let’s face it, I was also curious. 

All recipe designers are. 

That’s what drives us to keep improving our recipes or to take the recipes of others as inspiration to build on. 

I only had a very little amount of my gluten-free flour mix on hand. That’s because I hadn’t had time to order the ingredients for the flour mix.

My husband re-ordered a new bank card a couple of months prior to this, and it got lost in the mail. The bank said they mailed it 2 months earlier. Since we didn't receive it, the bank canceled BOTH of our cards because my card had the same number as the card that didn’t show up.

I did have a whole box of sweet-rice flour in the pantry.

And I wondered if making up a small batch of mix using that type of flour would work. 

Well . . . 

All I have to say is that the pie crust didn’t work well.

Sweet-rice flour is made with short-grain, sticky rice and it was so soft that the dough was already dough before I even got to the water part. 

I eliminated the water but the final product had too much shortening for that type of rice. It held the pie together okay, and we’re eating it, but it’s a bit soggy and very crumbly. 

The other thing I did wrong with the crust was to over bake it.

I used Truvia instead of the granulated sugar called for in the pie crust recipe. Truvia is a combination of Stevia and Erythritol; and between the sugar substitute and the sticky-rice flour, it wasn’t even close to being brown after 20 minutes. 

Since I cooked mostly with a toaster oven back then (to avoid the natural gas oven I was allergic to), I cooked it an extra 5 minutes. 

Yes, it got a little bit brown, but it also cracked all over the place! 

It looked like a spider web.

So be aware that if you use a sugar alternative, your homemade gluten-free pie crust might not brown, like a traditional pie crust does, and whatever color it is after 15 minutes of baking, don’t cook it any longer. 

Just let it be.

Gluten-Free Pie Crust Options

It's the end of 2020 now, and I still cannot make a decent all-purpose pie crust, so we usually pick up a Wholly Wholesome Gluten-Free Pie Crust from Kroger for special occasions. 

It comes in a 2-pack in the frozen section of the store.

Walmart nearby carries a Mi-Del Graham-Style Gluten-Free Pie Crust that is similar to what you can make with graham cracker crumbs or gluten-free cookie crumbs; except you don't have to pre-bake this one. It also comes in gingerbread and chocolate varieties, but I haven't seen those here in Texas.

Both options are certified by the GFCO, so they contain up to 10 ppm of gluten.

If you want to make your own pie crust, a simple almond-flour crust would work well with this recipe. Since the flour is made from ground skinless almonds, the result is similar to a graham cracker pie crust:

Gluten-Free Almond Pie Crust

Ingredients

• 1-1/2 cups blanched almond flour
• 1/3 cup granulated sugar
• 2 tablespoons melted butter
• 1 egg white

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine almond flour, sugar, butter, and egg white, stirring to mix well. Press into your pie plate. Bake 10 minutes.

Cool before filling.

Strawberry-Blueberry Pie Filling – the Changes I Made

The original recipe was for a sugar-free strawberry pie, but pie filling gives you a bit more room to play around. 

While I did have some sliced strawberries (as well as the whole berries) in the freezer from when I bought a case of them at the beginning of the season, I decided to use a cup of reconstituted freeze-dried blueberries instead. 

That gave the pie a red-white-and-blue theme for the holiday.

I didn’t have any cook and serve vanilla pudding mix, so I decided to use 2 tablespoons of cornstarch to make up for that and added a little bit of vanilla. 

That’s basically what pudding mix is, starch plus flavoring, so I was pretty confident it would work. 

Overall, the strawberry pie filling came out very well. 

I don’t think I’ll pay for the pudding mix anymore because the cornstarch and sweetener worked just as well.

If you don't have any blueberries on hand, you can substitute a cup of sliced strawberries instead.

Easy Strawberry-Blueberry Pie

Serves 8

Pie Filling Ingredients:

• 2 tablespoons cornstarch (I use Argo)
• small package of strawberry gelatin
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1-1/4 cups water
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla
• About 3 cups whole strawberries (fresh or frozen)
• 1 cup blueberries (fresh or frozen)
• gluten-free pre-baked pie crust

Method:

In a medium-sized saucepan, whisk together the cornstarch, gelatin, and sugar. Add water and vanilla. Bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring constantly. 

Continue cooking for another couple of minutes, until the mixture thickens. Remove from heat. 

Arrange the whole strawberries in the bottom of the pie crust, point up, in a single layer. Sprinkle with blueberries, to help fill in the cracks between the whole strawberries. 

Carefully pour the glaze over the fruit, making sure to cover it thoroughly. You want to leave enough space between the fruit for the glaze to flow down and hold the fruit firm as it chills. 

Chill to set.