Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Pie Spy - On the Road to SoCal


Hey, pie lovers! Pie Spy is hitting the road again at the end of May, bound for the sunny south. POPS (Partner of Pie Spy - thank you for the acronym, Kim!) is also going on the adventure and is compiling a list of eateries to check out. We have some pie destinations in mind, and our voyage may splash over into Orange County. So we wanted to give all of you who enjoy SacPie a chance to contribute your suggestions for new or favorite places we should spy on.


Please post in your comments any pie stops that come to mind. Check out our posting of 19 March, Pie in Los Angeles, to see the hallowed ground we have already trod (trod?). We will not be revisiting those, but we will do our best to visit as many of the new ones as we can. Anything especially offbeat or just plain odd would place high on our growing list.

We will also be spending quality time on the beach in Orange County, so pie stops in Newport Beach, San Clemente, Seal Beach, or other coastal spots will give you double credits! So please help us plan our road trip and get in on the pie safari. Post your suggestions in comments by 21 May 2010. Thanks!


Sunday, April 25, 2010

Pie Movie - Waitress

All right. Maybe you want to think about pie, but without having to make or eat one yourself.

(Really?)

The couch is too comfortable, the kitchen is too warm, your belly too full, the cupboard too bare. In that case, maybe today is the day to see "Waitress." If you didn't see it when it came to the Tower Theatre in 2006, you can get it on DVD. We just watched it again the other night (thank you, McClatchy Library).

The film features Keri Russell as the young, small-town titular waitress, who is even more of a pie baker than Sac Pie. Unlike Sac Pie's pie thing, though, pies help the troubled Jenna express her feelings, and at the same time, assert some measure of control and accomplishment in her very out-of-control life. She even gives pies as gifts, and her pies are the talk of the town.

The movie was directed by Adrienne Shelley, who also plays the role of one of Jenna's two waitress friends. I fell in love with Adrienne Shelley in Hal Hartley's movies, "The Unbelievable Truth," and "Trust," but that's another story.

They made a lot of pies in this movie - the pies were uncredited as co-stars, however. There's I Hate My Husband pie, I Don't Want Earl's Baby pie, Naughty Pumpkin pie, Vanilla Custard Pie With Banana Hold the Banana, and several others. Not an expected normal pie among them, sweet or savory. There is a song about pie that Adrienne Shelley wrote for the movie - kind of a pie lullaby.

Amidst all of the inventing and making of pies, there is a very real and compelling story of a woman who has lost her way. There is romance, desperation, sparklingly funny dialogue, wayward men, and a tasty plot twist. We watch Jenna make (and sometimes unmake) several pies in the kitchen of the diner where she works - and there, she is in charge and restored to herself. The pies look gorgeous, most of the time, and we get to see several people digging in to them. Adrienne Shelley claimed that she added several pounds during the filming, because of all the pie.

This movie has a wealth of elements that we all can identify with: small town charm, what we learned from our parents, friendship, doomed relationships, the fears of being a parent, living with our mistakes, and figuring out how to be happy are among the themes in "Waitress."

It's a sweet and lively movie, and Sac Pie loves it for many reasons, but especially for putting pie in the foreground for those of us on the couch!

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Testing 1-2-3-Whole Wheat Pie Crust


If you are a purist about pie - seasonal fruit, organic ingredients, all natural - then it makes sense that you would eschew white flour in favor of a more healthful option for your pie crust....If it makes the pie better, that is.

Whole wheat pie crust: just the words seem to connote hardpan, hockey pucks, hippies, humorlessness, heaviness, and humdrum. On the flip side, though, there are the health benefits and perhaps the fun of experimentation with a new approach to pastry.

The challenge is to find a recipe that not only does what pie dough should - rolls, stretches, flakes, browns, and tastes good - but provides those attributes without requiring some other ingredients that subtract from the good reasons to use whole wheat flour. Whole wheat crusts that we've tried in the past were made with cooking oil instead of shortening, and they were, to be blunt, miserable to work with, unbeautiful to look at, and unpalatable to eat. Let's see if this one is an improvement.

In this inaugural attempt, we had to start somewhere...and Sac Pie can almost hear you moaning about this already...so we picked a recipe that included some familiars - butter as well as shortening, white flour as well as whole wheat. We know, we know. We hope you whole wheat zealots will not be too disappointed. We need a jumping-off point for continued experiments, and we figure we can gradually reduce butter and white flour and stop before we reach that "humdrum" end point. We are going to follow the recipe to the letter and see what happens. This trial is also a first for us using butter in pie dough ANNNNNDDD using our Cuisinart to make the dough.

This recipe comes from WikiHow. We chose it because it could be done in relatively few steps and without ingredients that we wouldn't otherwise use in a pie pastry.

For this recipe, we decided to make a pie with the remaining frozen peaches from last summer (which were luscious, were they not?). So that, if the crust was a bust, we would at least have that lovely fruit to spoon up.


As with most pie dough, the key thing again is that your liquid is ice-cold. If you do use a food processor to blend the fat into the flour, open it up and lift the bottom ingredients upward with a spatula or spoon, to make sure nothing is getting trapped in a clump on the bottom.

All right, here is the recipe, from WikiHow for pie dough with whole wheat flour:

Ingredients:
2 c all-purpose white flour
1/2 c whole wheat flour
1/2 c butter
1/2 c shortening
ice cold water (several tablespoons)
1 tsp(ish) salt
1 T(ish) sugar

Instructions:
Add the dry ingredients to the bowl of a food processor and pulse, roughly 5 times at 1 to 2 seconds each pulse.
Cut the butter into small chunks.
Add the chunks of butter to the bowl and pulse again, roughly 5 times at 1 to 2 seconds each time. With a spoon or spatula, lift the mixture from bottom to top all the way around the bowl.
Add the shortening, in small chunks to the bowl and pulse again. Lift again. At this point the mixture should look slightly crumbly.
Add the water in 1-2 T increments, followed by a pulse of the processor (and a lift). Repeat until the dough begins to clump and pull away from the sides of the bowl.
When you reach this point, feel the dough by squeezing it lightly. It should be moist, pliable, and slightly sticky. Remove it from the food processor and into another bowl, and shape into a ball.
The dough should be worked with rather quickly to keep the butter from melting. You may elect to cover it with a damp towel if the day is warm and dry.

You can see that the dough forms a ball quite easily, is moist and not crumbly, and that the butter and shortening are well distributed.


Follow this recipe and you will end up with almost enough dough for two pies. In addition to the pie shown above, we made a small 7-incher with the extra dough (also with double crust). You will find that the dough is very easy to roll out - possibly a little more elastic than our usual recipe. As with our usual recipe, it is, however, still slow to brown. We left this baby in the oven for nearly an hour (fearful of overcooking), the last 20 minutes on the top rack.

We encountered almost immediate shrinkage of the pastry as it began to warm up. You can see a little warping of the edge in the picture below. Interestingly, this did not happen to the small 7-inch pie made with the same pastry. Hmmm. Was it the result of two different pie pan materials? Was it anything to do with the differences in the two fillings? Sac Pie is mystified. We only know that it's not the dough itself that causes shrinking.


It doesn't look like it's going to taste bad, does it?

Well, it was perfectly fine. We wanted it to be a little more flaky on top, so there is room for improvement. We could not discern the benefits of the butter in either taste, appearance, or texture of the crust. We detected a slightly dry feel to the crust, but this might have been the result of the pie's bake-a-thon in the oven rather than the ingredients. With all of those things in mind, we still enjoyed snarfing up this pie and the first one gives us confidence to try again: less butter, maybe a small increment of whole wheat flour to replace the white flour.

Don't be intimidated by the novelty of this recipe. It behaves well, tastes good, and is pleasing to the eye. It makes a fine package for your frozen peaches, and is a homey, comforting product.