Pie Spy in LA County

Spoiler alert! Serious foodporn follows.

Although no one responded to my blog request for suggested venues for our May Pie Safari, we were met with a wealth of choices, mystery spots, and Plan B-level selections when we arrived in LA County.

In addition to all the places we visited that did NOT have pie, Pie Spy and POPS managed to hit and sample many fine pie establishments in LA, Pasadena, Eagle Rock, and Altadena. The obvious choices were places that had the word PIE in their names, but we dug a little deeper for some true gems. No, gentle reader, we did not flinch from overeating in the service of research! This area is rich with great cuisine of all sorts, and every dining experience we had there was very, very good. A little bit of sticker shock in Pasadena itself - we agreed that we could have gone to France with just what we spent on food there - but otherwise, it was a delight to wander and find something really wonderful around every corner. The down side of that is, of course, that there are only so many spots you can visit in a short vacation. We will be saving many, many of them on our Next Time List.

That includes Larkin's, in Eagle Rock at 1496 Colorado Boulevard (larkinsjoint.com). Terrific, spiced-up southern cooking and BBQ, with one of the most interesting salad ideas we've seen in quite a long time - mixed greens with okra croquettes! We would have loved some of Larkin's mom's own sweet potato pie after dinner, but we were just too, too full after the salad, some barbecued portobello mushrooms, and two sides. In fact, we didn't even feel hungry the next day.

Next Time List also includes Auntie Em's - 4616 Eagle Rock Blvd., Eagle Rock (auntieemskitchen.com). Somebody beat us to the cherry-berry pie while we were ordering lunch, and they bought the whole thing. Even more of a pie nut than we are, apparently. Chef Teri Wahl does savory pot pies from time to time, as well as desserts.

So let's get rolling on the inventory.

Pie N Burger - 913 E. California, Pasadena (pienburger.com). The place looks like it's been there forever - since 1963, in fact. The menu is on the wall at the front and back of the diner. Lunch was a big salad and a garden burger, but that was only to buy us some time in making our selection for a pie slice. There were a couple of dozen pie choices, and many of them were fresh fruit. We settled on boysenberry. Win! Look how gorgeous this is. The flavor of boysenberry (a fruit that was perfected and made popular down in Orange County, at Knott's Berry Farm, not the amusement park) was clean and unmuddled by excessive refined sugar. Really, really great. Definitely $4.50 worth of fun. And we loved the clock!

Gourmet Cobbler Factory, 33 N Catalina Ave., Pasadena (thegourmetcobblerfactory.com) - While Pie Spy was busy being entertained in a stuffy conference room, POPS was out and about scouting for goodies. POPS has a nose for bakeries, which he follows faithfully, and it never fails. He snagged us a golden baby sweet potato pie from the cobbler joint. Try as we might, we could not damp down the almost radioactive orange color of this tiny pie in the photo. By the way, we appreciate that the POPS has the will power to delay gratification and share these yummies with yours truly, instead of snarfing them up when we are not looking. Creamy, spicy, definitely rich and flavorful, but not overtly sweet - we spooned up the sweet potato pie-ette as breakfast and were very happy. Props to the Cobbler Factory for selling fruit cobblers in foil tins from the personal to vat-sized.

POPS happened across a few Armenian bakeries with very reasonably priced treats, some of which were new discoveries. Why don't we have any talented Armenian bakers here in SacTown? Here are the highlights:

Old Sasoon Bakery - 1132 N. Allen Ave, Pasadena. Our favorite was their swiss chard turnover (panjar) and tiny spinach pie (beorag). Neither of these was anything like a traditional Greek-style spanakopita, or any other spinach pie we've tried. The swiss chard hand pie was made of a sturdy dough and a mysterious combination of seasonings (including tahini and onion) that imparted a reddish color and spicy kick to the filling. This is something we want more of - it makes an excellent lunch. No messy flakes or greasy fingers, either. Old Sasoon has a website, but it doesn't seem to be working.

Two other Armenian bakeries, close by:

Panos - 1649 E. Washington Blvd., Pasadena (panosbakery.com). No pie- all cookies, baklava, and other Mediterranean-inflected sweets. Which we sampled; many.

Vrej - 1074 N. Allen, Pasadena (vrejpastry.net) - All cookies, baklava, and gorgeous, lovely cakes. Half a pound of cookies was about three dollars.

(sigh)...Back to pie.

Dutch Oven Bakery - 2281 Lake Ave., Altadena. Sunday we found fresh apple turnovers at this very unassuming little bakery. This is not the kind of bakery that has a web site. No puff pastry and Denny's style filling here - just a simple, easy-to-handle firm dough and fresh apples with cinnamon. This little gem also sold peach cobbler in vats, as at the Cobbler Factory. One of their menu items is an old-school sweet bean pie, but none were available. It was Sunday, after all, on a holiday weekend. Put that on the Next Time List. Prices were very reasonable here, too.

EuroPane - 345 E Colorado, Pasadena. EuroPane has a newer location at 950 E. Colorado, where we had terrific blueberry brioche and apple strudel on our first day. We loved the large, rough-hewn wooden table made out of a single slab. The interior is quite beautiful and a great place to sip your coffee in peace. At the original location, which is smaller and more lively, we sampled the apple pie-ette with lattice crust. For breakfast, oh yeah! And it was completely satisfying in all respects - a very homemade quality, excellent flavors, and extremely fresh. POPS was able to use the Spy Cam to get into the prep area and snap a few shots of the pie master at work. Note that she is multitasking.

If we can digress for just a minute - You must visit Bulgarini Gelato at 749 E. Altadena Drive, Altadena (bulgarinigelato.com). It is in an unassuming strip-mall location that you may have to miss a couple of times before you find it. But it is definitely worth multiple visits. Handmade gelati of various flavors, including unconventional ones like goat's milk straciatella, Florentine salted chocolate, and best of all, plain yogurt gelato with olive oil drizzled on top. This last one was perfectly balanced between sweet and tart, and very rich - almost like eating cream cheese. The half-teaspoon of olive oil was an unexpected complement to the flavor. Our server told us that they serve this gelato often at wine tastings, and we can appreciate how it would be well received as such, but we could eat it every day, whether there is any wine involved or not.

Trails Cafe - 2333 Ferndell Road, Los Feliz (thetrailslosfeliz.com, not much of a website) - Just inside Griffith Park on Ferndell Road in LA is the very popular Trails Cafe. Just a few short years ago, there was nothing here but a Coke machine. We found out about the Trails through LA Weekly, and are glad we did. The cafe serves all kinds of snacks, a few salads, coffee, and more substantial fare in addition to pie. The line was long but the wait was not. We spied the very tall apple pie through the glass (see the photo at the top of today's post) and knew we had to have it. Our server told us there were also some individual cherry crisps on hand. We had to have that too, for back stock. All the baked items are 'from scratch,' a friendly sign informed us.


Our pie was served warm, a slice large enough for a village. It looks wonderful in the photo - that brown, flaky crust, chunky fruit, et cetera, right? The pie had skins-on chunks of Golden Delicious that were just firm enough, with delicate flavor. Leaving the skins on was not a good choice. The pie had a weird, stringy brown goo inside, which tasted cinnamony-sweet but was visually unappealing - it would stretch almost like warm mozzarella. We found the crust hard to pierce with a recyclable plastic fork. Make no mistake, though - we ate the whole thing! At $4.50 a slice, we felt we could not let any go to waste.

The cherry crisp was in the mini-pie shell on the upper left of the photo below. We saved it until we came home to Sac, and it traveled very well. The cherries were perfectly sweet/tart and chewy, with no goo. The pie shell was made of the same very firm dough formulation as the apple pie, but it seemed to work a lot better as a bowl for the cherries and oatmeal crisp topping. Worth the five bucks! Good job, Trails. Keep this one on the menu!

House of Pies, 1869 N. Vermont, Los Angeles (houseofpiesrestaurant.com) - No pie safari can be undertaken without at least a look in at the House of Pies, the last holdout of what was once a large chain throughout the LA region. The sign alone lets the imagination run wild. We stopped in about 30 minutes after we ate the apple pie at the Trails. In retrospect, this was probably too soon. At this point, all Pie Spy's pie receptors were redlined, and nothing in the case looked good. On view in the cases were multiple pies of the custard, meringue, and cheesecake varieties. We did not spy any fruit pies, and in truth, didn't want any! But we had to know. And now we do.

While we recognize that we were merely scratching the surface of potential pie opportunities, we think our trip was a total success. Pie Spy was inspired to find some new fillings to experiment with, to get brave with soft berries that are now in season, and to check in again with our local Sacramento scene and see what's on the menu. What have you had your eye on while we were away?

Pie of the Week - Blueberry

Ask us what our favorite fruit is. Go ahead.

No, it is not dragon fruit.

It's too early for this season's blueberries to make a fresh blueberry pie. But we just can't wait another minute. We need to make some space in the freezer for this year's supply, so we need to use up last summer's frozen bounty and get our taste buds ready for a season of abundant berry happiness. And, well, we need pie.

Way before Sac Pie was Sac Pie, there was a little kid whose family spent some summer weekends with another family in southern New Jersey, one of the berry-growingest places in the country. Blues love the heat and sandy soil of the Jersey coastal plain. We would wake up on a July morning, and go out before it got hot, with our moms and sibs and a picnic lunch - about a dozen of us, in two enormous station wagons - to pick blueberries for a few hours at one of the local you-pick farms. The moms would split up the take, and bake and freeze and sprinkle blueberries every which way. Our families had full-size freezers, as was the rage in the 1970s, so the moms learned how to freeze and package blueberries so they would last us all year.

We gorged on the fresh, warm ones straight from the bushes while we were picking because we were naughty and unruly little people. We whined about being hot and thirsty and about the bucket of blue getting too heavy to carry. We chased each other down the endless rows of bushes. Our collective harvest was 20 or 30 pounds each time, so the farmer definitely did not lose money. In the days following our descent upon the berry farm like a swarm of locusts, there were pancakes, coffee cakes, ice cream, shakes, and fruit salads full of blueberries. There were eight or nine happy little kids with blue tongues, teeth, and fingers. And there was that one kid who got scarred for life picking blueberries and never willingly ate them again. Overall, it was really great. Our moms are gone now, but they made a life-long memory for us of the joy of picking delicious fruit while the sun shines.

The blueberry makes for pie nirvana. Today, we've got the semi-good-for-you whole wheat crust with palm oil shortening (with no trans fats and no cholesterol), about 5 cups of blueberries so plump they look like concord grapes (don't forget to remind everyone that you're getting a potent dose of antioxidants), about 3 tablespoons (to taste) of organic cane sugar, a third-cup of tapioca mixed in with the fruit, and some fresh grated lemon zest from the back yard tree. If you have your own stash of last summer's haul in the freezer, you might as well use it up, because more blueberries are on the way soon. If you are not stocked, go to Trader Joe's and buy their frozen blueberries, which are consistently good and not expensive (how do they do it?). As with any other frozen fruit filling, you will need to bake this pie a little longer than the fresh-fruit version.

Try this and see if it doesn't taste like summer. Or, at least, enough like summer to make you hang on for this year's crop. The unassuming, wall-flowerish blueberries are transformed into something jammy, and their perfume blends with that of the lemon zest to create a sillage, almost like roses, that evokes sitting among the berry bushes in the summer sunshine. You can almost hear the birds chirping. No, wait - those are real birds.

With juicier fruits like these, we like to make a mound of berries in the middle, and then press a subtle moat into the top crust before we seal it. The moat will catch any boiling juices that escape through the slits on the surface of the pie. It may take expanding the circumference of the upper crust by another 2 inches, so you have to plan ahead. But this way, we can further postpone cleaning the oven.

How's your crimping technique?

We learned this fluted edge from one of our favorite moms. We like it even better than the way we learned it from our own mom. And it is much, much, much more interesting than the freshman-level fork-crimping method. You just pinch the edge (from the inside of the pie pan) with thumb and forefinger of one hand (the left, in the example below). Then use the forefinger (or forefinger knuckle) and thumb of the other hand to push in and shape the edge from the outside of the pan, with just enough pressure exerted from both sides to seal the edge at the same time. As you practice this more, your flutes will become more uniform, and you will find that you can adjust the size of them so that the last flute you make blends seamlessly with the first one.

We are getting more confident with the use of whole wheat flour (this time, pastry flour) as a sub for half of the white flour in the dough. It added a definite tawny color to the final product, did not warp or ripple, and improves the firmness of the crust. Be advised that the dough may dry out faster than the usual formula - so you may have to roll it out more quickly than you would otherwise. But otherwise, no adjustments should be necessary.

Use caution, and a big spoon, if eating this pie in a hammock or on a white couch. That blueberry stain may come off your teeth and fingers, but it does not, not, not come out of fabrics!

Pie of the Week - Quiche and Tell

There are few dishes that we can think of that can be served up as breakfast, or lunch, or dinner. Depending on the filling, a burrito may fit the bill. Of course, the revered Freeport Bakery Knish is a winner. Spanakopita could also work (have we mentioned Petra yet, at 16th and L? Wait 'til you see their monster spanakopita). In each case, it's got a combination of savory ingredients and interesting spices with something soothing and plain, like potatoes, pastry, or eggs. The dishes that are successful meal tri-fectas also feel substantial - enough to last you awhile - but not gratiutously rich.

And where are you going to get a dynamite all-day burrito in this town? It's not as easy as it should be. Especially if you don't eat meat. This is a source of frequent lament at Sac Pie.

Now where were we?

Oh, yes - it's time to make a quiche. Or more accurately, a vegetable-egg pie. It won't be six inches tall, as we see it in some bakery and specialty grocery cases. But then, it won't cost $20, either. It will be fitting for Sunday breakfast/brunch with fresh fruit, or an elegant brown-bag workday lunch, or a light evening meal with a fresh tomato or beet salad. Great for springtime. It has some good protein in it, and green vegetables to make you big and strong. If spinach isn't your vegetable of choice, try some finely chopped steamed broccoli instead. If you make a whole wheat crust, then you can feel especially virtuous when you eat it. It's pretty easy to toss together, with ingredients you probably have in your refrigerator or freezer right now. You will find, after a few times making it, that you don't even need a recipe. It can be a unique work of art every time you make it. Let's cook!

Ingredients:

Basic pie dough for one 9-inch crust

Four eggs (room temperature)

[Optional: water or milk]

1 c (dry) chopped frozen spinach, thawed and squeezed

[Optional: 1 potato, peeled and thinly sliced]

1-2 T finely chopped scallion

1 to 1.5 c grated cheese, such as Gruyere, Iberico, Swiss, Havarti, or a combination

Seasonings to taste: ground pepper, dried tarragon, chervil, thyme, chives

Directions:

Pre-heat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Place the pie dough in a 9-inch pie pan or quiche dish, pressing dough into the corners and allowing it to drape over the edge.

[Optional: Line the bottom of the pastry with the thinly sliced potatoes.] Sprinkle the onions evenly across the bottom surface.

Separate three of the four eggs. Beat the one whole egg with the three separated yolks until well mixed. You may decide to add a tablespoon of water or milk to this mixture. Mix in the chopped spinach with the eggs until evenly combined. Add all but a handful of the grated cheese, Add to the mixture whatever herbs and spices you wish. Then whip the remaining egg whites (in a clean bowl) until stiff peaks form.

Using a spatula, slowly and gently fold the egg whites into the egg-spinach mixture. This is what will give your quiche an oven bounce that won't completely deflate after it cools. Use even, circular motions and continue until the whites are evenly mixed in with the egg-spinach combination. Don't overdo it or the mixture will probably deflate.

Pour the filling into the pastry-lined dish. Trim the edge of the pastry and bake. About halfway through the bake time (i.e., when the middle is starting to be less jiggly), you may garnish the top with the remaining cheese and perhaps a few thin slices of tomato or red bell pepper. Bake until the center of the quiche is firm and the top golden, about 40 to 45 minutes.

Cool 20 minutes before slicing and, no matter what time of day it is, you will have pie-that's-a-meal, fresh and ready.