This Must Be Where Pies Go When They Die
This is not a baking blog but I don't feel like talking about the government, do you
Note: I was going to publish this yesterday and did not, for obvious reasons. If you want to read some takes about the events at the Capitol Building…well, I’m sure you can find those easily enough. But this is about pie.
I don’t consider myself much of a “hobbies” person. But over the past year I’ve picked up a pair of them: playing guitar (which I wrote about a few months ago) and baking pies.
Neither of them seem like they should be in my wheelhouse at all, to be honest. I am not a precise, methodical, or careful person, and both stringed instruments and pastry dough require some degree of each of those traits. But I do love to experiment! And there are few places better suited to playing around with flavors than the empty space inside a pie crust.
Perhaps the easiest thing to point to about why baking pies appeals to me so much—besides the fact that I’m a Certified Treat Boy through and through—is that there is a certain finality to the act of putting it in the oven. Pastry dough is not the kind of thing you want to repeatedly open the oven to check on, as anyone who has watched The Great British Baking Show can tell you, and so setting my creations onto their trays and closing the door requires the ability to cope with uncertainty. It will either stay within the confines of the crust, or it won’t—leaking out, creating the dreaded soggy bottom. It will either cook through inside without scorching the crust, or it won’t. In this small and unimportant act there is an important chance to practice letting go.
(In my case this is particularly extreme. The oven in the apartment that my wife and I have lived in for the past 5+ years, which we’ll be vacating soon, has a mind of its own, and it often gets much too hot much too fast. If a given recipe calls for 45 minutes at 375°, that means 31 minutes at 325° at our house. Or 27 minutes, or 42. And maybe it actually needs 350° on this particular day because it’s raining and Saturn is positioned just so. The precision required for perfect pastry is made a mockery of by our appliances. But who doesn’t love an additional challenge?)
All the time I’ve spent inside this year has led to a few particularly memorable pies that I’d like to share with you, if you’re into that kind of thing. Where I’ve used someone else’s recipe I’ll share it; where I invented the pie out of whole cloth I’ll try to describe the recipe to you in case you feel like taking it for yourself. I think Karl Marx said something about that. Anyway, here are a few of my favorites, in no particular order:
I have to warn you in advance that this recipe is written in the most insufferable way humanly possible. I was ready to be even more mad at it before I discovered, perusing the comments, that it’s actually written in the voice of a character from the show Supernatural. I will have to take their word for it.
I made some embellishments and improvements to this one. Unlike the recipe, I made my own crust, because it’s not actually that hard to get right as long as you keep your fats cold. (I use the crust recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction, and I’ve recently started swapping out the shortening for lard, which has upped my crust game considerably.) I also doubled the amount of whiskey in the recipe and reduced the lemons from 3 to 2.5, which made an improvement between my first attempt at this and my second.
The author was right about needing to drink a hot toddy or three to go with the pie, though. Can’t recommend that highly enough.
Olympic Forest Pie (my own creation)
I had envisioned this as a sort of companion pie for my piece on the Olympic National Park. (I also have a pair of savory ones planned to go with it—an elk and chanterelle mushroom pie, and a salmon and wild asparagus pie. I’ll report back if I pull those off.) As such I wanted to limit myself to ingredients that grow wild on the Olympic Peninsula. If I were making this in a different season I could have actually foraged for the blackberries, marionberries, and salal berries that went into the filling; unfortunately I first attempted it a few weeks ago and had to settle for store-bought—I even found some salal berry jam on Etsy, which no grocery store sells as far as I know.
The real triumph, though, was the crust. Given the edibility, fragrance, and vitamin content of evergreen needles, is there such a thing, I wondered, as an evergreen shortbread cookie? Reader, there is. I decided to take this cookie recipe—for which I selected a few handfuls of Douglas fir needles, blitzed with sugar—and cross it with a shortbread pie crust recipe. After I pressed the shortbread cookie dough into the pie tin I took the excess and crumbled it over the berry mix; really my only regret is not making twice as much dough and getting a proper crumble top going, as the crust alone is maybe the best thing I’ve ever baked.
As an added bonus I squeezed some juice from the excess berry mix, scooped in a cube’s worth of fir sugar, and stirred in some whiskey and added ice for what I’ll call a “PNW Old Fashioned.” A perfect complement.
Most of my Seattle friend group are transplants from elsewhere, and as a result we usually spend every Thanksgiving together. This year (this unprecedented year) we obviously were not going to do that, so we planned a food exchange instead. I had the ambitious idea to bake every household their own pie after my mom got me Lauren Ko’s Pieometry book for my birthday, from which this recipe comes. Of course, after I’d made this plan and promise I looked a little more closely at the recipes I’d picked out and realized I lacked the necessary hardware to pull them off—remember that thing about me not being precise or careful? So I ended up buying a hand mixer and a gigantic mixing bowl just to pull this one off.
The recipe I linked above isn’t exactly the one I used; many of her recipes are only in Pieometry. The version I made had the same whipped white chocolate matcha filling as this, but I also used Ko’s dark chocolate matcha tart crust (the link shows one with her funfetti Oreo crust) and made the waves without using sprinkles. This one, held up over Zoom, even got an approving nod from my wife’s grandmother, an incredible traditional baker, who is (rightly) suspicious of my forays into madness.
As a bonus, my first attempt at the tart crust got too scorched around the edges to use, so I punched out the middle and cut it into semi-sweet chocolate matcha cookies. They were buttery and out of control.
Astute readers will have noticed that something else I like about making pies that I failed to note earlier is “drinking while I make pies.” I was raised by Catholics, not Puritans, and it’s not like I’m going to buy and use only as much booze as is needed for my recipe. So the backbone for this recipe came out of a much larger steaming pot of mulled wine, which I also sampled from liberally as I worked.
This is sort of a Frankenstein recipe that I haphazardly cobbled together from three others based on the fact that none of them were exactly what I wanted and I wasn’t gonna go back to the store. The body of it comes from cranberries, cherries, and orange juice cooking down in the wine; the crust is the same “Sally’s” crust I linked above.
“Marble to Behold” Savory Pie (Lauren Ko/LOKOKITCHEN)
Our fifth and final entry is another Thanksgiving experiment out of Pieometry. This pie is, frankly, outrageous: a basil, chive, and thyme crust with a caramelized onion and potato filling and an Irish cheddar topping, broiled to golden brown. I ate some for breakfast this morning and for dinner Monday night. Since this recipe isn’t online as far as I know, I’ll try not to torture you with too many descriptions—you should get the book if you like to do this sort of thing.
At no point in this pie’s process will you get tired of smelling your kitchen. Onions that caramelize for at least an hour, fresh herbs tossed with butter, the toasting of cheeses in the oven…look, I might have to stop writing and go get another piece.
Talk to you next week.
- Chuck
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