I am writing 100 How-To essays. It is a big project. Here is why I am doing it. This is essay 39 of 100.
The Basics of Loving Pie
I’m searching my mind to think of the first time I made a pie. I don’t think this was it, but I do recall this time my grandma came to visit — I must have been, like, 14, because I wasn’t vegan yet — and I put together an apple pie using a crust from the store. It wasn’t pie dough that you could roll and do what you wanted with, but I pulled the crust out of the tinfoil packaging it came in, let it warm up, and rolled it into a ball. Then I rolled the ball flat, put it back in the tin, and ultimately told my grandma I’d made the crust myself, from scratch. She said, “Mmmm. What did you make this with?” I did not want to tell her I’d made it with a store bought pie crust that I’d mashed up and bastardized, so I said, “butter.” “Oh, well, no wonder,” she said, like women always say in movies when someone says “butter.”
I’ve tried a lot of pie crust recipes since then; I’ve done trendy things like integrating spelt flour or using vodka in the crust. Since the pie for Grandma, I estimate that I have made 500 pies. That’s a respectable number for a regular old home cook without a food blog or anything. (I mean, sure: this is a blog, and this particular entry is about food, but you know what I’m trying to say.) The recipe I use is modified from the "Joy of Cooking” — from the weathered edition my mother had in her kitchen since (I think) before I was born. Pie dough is really easy, so don’t let them fool you on “Great British Baking Show” or in Good Housekeeping. People talk up and down about overworking your dough, or about how you should use a food processor, and the reality is that it is difficult to truly ruin a pie.
Before you get mad at me and yell that you’ve had so many pies that are better than other pies, let me say this: of course you have. This is one of the magical things about pies. Master the basic moves of pie-making (which you can do today! Literally, you can be done mastering these moves within five total hours! Most of which you’ll spend resting while the pie dough is in the fridge!), and you can get better at pie. Or, why not try a galette, which is just a pie that is easier to make, requires fewer resources, and will impress your friends more? (They will gasp and say that your galette is “rustic,” and they will be right.)
Frankly, I have hesitated to make a post about pie in the past. There’s not a great deal of emotional depth or metaphor that I can draw from pie. My love for pie is pure and uncomplicated. But I do think I have a lot to share about pie, and it was National Pie Day yesterday, so the time seemed right to put into writing all the wisdom I’ve accumulated after being a pie stan for the greater part of three decades. If you take one thing away from what I’ve written here, let it be this: anyone can make a pie, any time, with any thing. Do not be intimidated by the pie. Embrace the pie as possibly (definitely, but I don’t want to argue with people who love Legos) the best invention man hath wrought.
What is A Pie?
I’m not going to look in a dictionary for this, because my definition is correct no matter what Webster or Julia Child or whoever has said in the past: A pie is a thing that (1) you can eat; (2) has a crust; and (3) has a filling or significant topping that (most of the time) was added before the crust was all the way baked. (There are no-bake exceptions here, and we will get to those.)
Is a pizza a pie? Yes. Spanikopita? Obviously. What about the earth? Because the earth has a crust. So is the earth a pie? No, reader, the earth is not a pie because you cannot eat it. A pie must satisfy the three points listed plainly above. Is a bread a pie? No, because a bread does not have a SIGNIFICANT topping. Sure, you can put jam on a bread, and that’s a toast, but still the experience is more about the bread than the jam, and it is therefore not a pie. Could a toast be a pie? I guess sure. If you can add enough toppings to a toast that it becomes analogous to what a person does when she adds enough toppings to a breadstick to make it a pizza, then a toast could become a pie. I am all about naming more good things as pies.
I have a book called “Rustic Fruit Desserts” that differentiates between a pie, a tart, a crumble, a fool, a trifle, a crisp, and twenty other things that are all basically pies. I call every one of those things a pie, and you can too. The more pies, the merrier.
How Do You Pie?
The image above tells you how I make a basic baked pie crust, but there are other ways to make a pie crust, too. I have provided another pie crust below, under the heading “alternative pie information.” Choose your crust, and make it. Don’t worry about failing at it. A rubbery pie crust is not such a bad thing, and a crumbly pie crust is, likewise, forgiving. I no longer even measure my ingredients when I make pie. I know that whatever I fill the pie with is going to marry the crust and that together their union will be lovely in the mouth.
Choose what you are going to fill the pie with. I strongly, deeply, whole-heartedly recommend fruit here. Other pies are all worthwhile, too, but I think fruit filling is a pie’s deepest truth. Fruit is good for you, and is naturally sweet, so you don’t have to add a lot of sugar to a fruit pie. (Quite often, I add none. Seriously: none. No one has ever once said, “You didn’t put any sugar in this!” About a fruit pie to which I added no sugar.) Also, fruit is naughty and often goes bad a lot sooner than you banked on. A pie will mask that secret the way a good deodorant takes a person from hard workout to sexy date night. Finally, fruit is complex and brings its own story to every pie it enters. A gooseberry is summery and quixotic; an apple is tangy and all-knowing. A fruit pie is a culinary saga. It is a favorite novel you’d read more than once.
If you choose a fruit filing (and you should), the traditional thing to do is: cut up the fruit into little pieces, add some sugar, squeeze in some lemon, mix in a spoonful of cornstarch, and let it sit for a few minutes before putting it in the pie crust. I don’t think it matters if you peel the fruit (I leave the peels on almost always, because it’s easier, and peels are good for you), and I don’t think it matters how big your chunks are. You should take out pits or seeds, though, as they are both poisonous and choking hazards.
Generally, and this can be different for different pies, you throw the pie in the oven at 400 degrees for the first 15 minutes and lower it to 350 for the last 40. The most important thing is that you don’t burn the pie crust. Underdone filling is fine — I mean, who wouldn’t eat unbaked fruit? — but scorched dough is harder to salvage. Harder, but not impossible.
Pie Hacks
I burn pies all the time, and find that scraping the burnt parts off with a butter knife remedies the problem nine out of ten times, flavor wise. This makes your pie look ugly, though, so try crushing a bunch of pistachios (green things help offset a parched aesthetic) and mixing them with a little honey, cinnamon, lemon, and sugar. Sprinkle this mixture liberally all over the top of the pie. Rustic!
Similarly, you can skip the top crust of pies and opt instead for a “crumble” topping using whatever you have around. My favorite crumble topping is melted coconut oil mixed with brown sugar, flour, salt, oatmeal, crushed pecans, cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice. How much of each of those items? I don’t know! I just throw them in a bowl and mix them together until I like how they taste. I can’t overstate how easy this is.
If you go the double crust route, people will think you are Martha Stewart for attempting a basic lattice crust, and lattices are insanely easy (and more forgiving looking than a full-sheet double crust). Watch YouTube videos to learn how to make a lattice. My favorite pie maker is Lauren Ko, and she shows how she makes her lattices here. They are advanced, but not as advanced as they look. Or, use small cookie cutters (I love leaf shapes) to cover your pie with little pie dough cookies. This also looks impressive and makes your friends think you are good at hard things.
Alternative Pies
I’ve loved many people with gluten allergies throughout my life, and the truth is that a baked pie crust is so much about the delicate gluten in all-purpose flour that it’s hard to replicate. However, if you’re going to do it, I recommend a mix of coconut flour and almond flour, plus a little baking powder to help crisp things up nicely.
Better yet, do a single layer raw crust that you can pour filling into. This is my favorite pie to make because it’s easy and people think you are the most amazing dessertstress in the whole wide world. The crust is just 1.5 cups of nuts (I use pecans, but anything will work; the recipe I started with asks for macadamia nuts, which I find overly decadent) + 0.5 cups pitted dates + 1 pinch of salt in a food processor or high speed blender. Press the mixture into a pie tin, and you’re done. These numbers are pretty relaxed, too; if you don’t have enough, add a little more of one thing or another thing. You want the mixture to hold together when you press it into the pie tin; that’s all that matters.
I fill this particular pie with a blend of cashews, coconut oil, and agave nectar (once again, just swirl ‘em all together, and soak your cashews first if you don’t have a high speed blender), with raw fruit studded throughout. This is a gorgeous pie. Pictures of this pie are right over there.
Vegans: there are so many substitutes for butter. I like fake butter a lot, but if you don’t, coconut oil is a good alternative, at different temperatures depending on how pliable you want your dough to be. Also, partially frozen olive oil is lovely and soft and gives a nice rich flavor to your dough. Regular old vegetable shortening also works, and makes for a very pretty pale yellow professional-seeming dough.
My Biggest Regret
Once I was asked to be a part of a comedic debate, and the debate was Cake vs. Pie. I was on Team Pie, and I thought that this would be the easiest debate of my life, but I lost. I am so humiliated to this day that I didn’t do right by pie. The person I was up against was really good at comedy and at being on stage, and I spent a lot of time reading fan fiction I’d written about pie, which was a gamble. I shouldn’t have gambled when it came to standing up for pie. I’m sorry, pie.
Here are some of the notes I took about why pie was better. I post them here now to memorialize my failure, and to try to ameliorate a tragic wrong.
Sweet and savory exist. Cakes do not have a savory option. If you want to tell me that pancakes can be savory, I’d say that that’s blasphemous and who wants a savory pancake. A savory pie — a nice warm pot pie, or a yummy deep fried empanada, or a delicious steamy spicy samosa, or a salty flaky spanakopita, which are all technically pies, is GREAT. Who wouldn’t want those things? Now imagine that I am offering you a savory cake. A fish cake, maybe. A cake of ground meat. These are horrible foods and no one wants them at all. They are embarrassments to the word “food."
On my birthday, I have often thrown the kind of party where if you want to come to the party you have to bring a pie. And then I pick the eight best pies and make my own pie that is a whole pie made out of the eight best different pieces of pie, and I need you to understand that this is an actually perfect food.
An average pie is infinitely better than an average cake. You walk into a gas station, let’s say. They have those one dollar Little Debbie hand pies, and they also have little pieces of horrible dry cake that are also one dollar. Ten out of ten times you’re going to pick the hand pie. The hand pie, which is an average pie, is actually very good.
My husband has pointed out, as we have started going around to different restaurants in Chicago that seem interesting to us, that every culture has its own appetizer pie, and that those are always magnificent. I’m talking about dough wrapped around some kind of spicy food that you can dip into a sauce and eat with your hands. No one ever doesn’t want that.
Pies are easier to make gluten free or sugar free or vegan or whatever, if that’s your thing. You can easily adapt a pie to any dietary restriction. Can’t eat flour? NO PROBLEM. Make the crust with ground nuts and dates. Pies don’t really require eggs or milk, either. There are easy subs for those things. A gluten free cake, on the other hand, is an abomination. If you’ve ever had one you will agree with me. It is a crumbly block of kinetic sand that will break into 10 trillion pieces within an instant. A gluten free pie is fine. The pastry is important but really not all that important. If the filling has to be the star, let the filling be the star.
I didn’t want to have to go here, but a pizza is technically a pie. And we all have to agree that pizza is a categorically perfect food. You don’t even have to be keen on sweets to understand pie’s vast superiority.
On National Pie Die, You Can Order A Hand Pie From McDonald’s
National Pie Day just passed: it’s January 23. But there is another national pie day, which people are more all about, because it’s punny and puns make us all feel weirdly intelligent. On March 14 (3.14, pi, ha ha) you will have another chance to celebrate this important holiday. When that day comes, it is possible you will have to go to work and you won’t have time to make a pie. That is ok, because it is the future, and you can order a pie from McDonald’s off of Postmates. McDonald’s pies are all that McDonald’s is good for, and they are $1.69, and they are vegan-friendly. So don’t make excuses for not celebrating this, the best food that man has ever known. Eat pie often, and with lots of people. Enjoy pie. So few things are as pure or as good or as right.