Pear Pie with Gruyere Crust

I've been obsessed with cheese and fruit pies since seeing an apple pie with cheese on a menu at Johnny Rockets as a teenager. It was pretty disappointing to find that it was a piece of apple pie with a slice of cheese sitting on top. I've often thought it should have been apples with Camembert cheese melted through it. In all these years I have yet to investigate whether this is possible and I'm fighting the urge to google a recipe right now so I can finish this post.

This particular pie is inspired by/stolen from the tv show, Pushing Daisies, which is set in a pie shop. One of the characters grates Gruyere cheese on top of pie. This seemed much easier to conceptualise than my teenage merging of cheese and pie. The first attempt of this pie was to just grate the cheese on top but I decided to put the cheese through the pastry on the second run through.

Pastry:
2 cups plain flour
155g chilled butter
100g Gruyere cheese, finely grated
3 tablespoons caster sugar
iced water

Filling:
800g peeled, diced pears
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 cup caster sugar
30g butter
juice of one lemon

For the pastry, put the flour, butter, sugar and cheese in a food processor and blend to a fine crumb. Add the iced water until it pulls together to a dough. Turn out and knead lightly. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

For the filling, coat the pears with lemon juice after finishing peeling and cutting to prevent from going brown. Melt the butter and add the other ingredients, coat the pears with this mixture.

Roll out the pastry and cut out to fill the pie tin. Spoon the filling into the pie tin, do not include the excess butter or you in danger of having soggy pastry. Top the pie tin with pastry and seal the edges. Brush the pastry with beaten egg and sprinkle with sugar. Cook in moderate oven, on the bottom shelf for 30 minutes or until the pastry goes golden.