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Pie and Baking Articles

Here are some valuable articles that are sure to assist you with both pastry science, and information to improve your processes and production.

Pie History and Trivia

We all love our pies, sweet or savoury, no matter. We all have our favourite pie, but how much do we know about the history of pies?

Let us enlighten you… (with the help of “What’s Cooking America”)

The first pies, called “coffins” or “coffyns” were savory meat pies with the crusts or pastry being tall, straight-sided with sealed-on floors and lids. Open-crust pastry (not tops or lids) were known as “traps.” These pies held assorted meats and sauce components and were baked more like a modern casserole with no pan (the crust itself was the pan, its pastry tough and inedible). The purpose of a pastry shell was mainly to serve as a storage container and serving vessel, and these are often too hard to actually eat. A small pie was known as a tartlet and a tart was a large, shallow open pie (this is still the definition in England). Since pastry was a staple ingredient in medieval menus, pastry making was taken for granted by the majority of early cookbooks, and recipes are not usually included. It wasn’t until the 16th century that cookbooks with pastry ingredients began appearing. Historian believe this was because cookbooks started appearing for the general household and not just for professional cooks.

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Let’s get ready to CRUMBLE – Toppings for Sweet Pies

Create delicious crumbles
by Terry Farris

Spice up your crumbles with nuts, crushed biscuits and rich brown sugars!

If you were asked to make a list of your favourite autumn and winter puddings, crumble would surely come near the top. Maybe it?s the contrast between the crunchy top and the tart fruit underneath; perhaps it?s because it?s so luscious served piping hot with cold cream poured over, or maybe it?s the anticipation of those midnight raids for spoonfuls of chilled leftovers straight from the fridge. Continue reading

The Prodigal Pie

by Beth Kracklauer
This article was first published in Saveur in Issue #115

The annual return of mincemeat desserts is an occasion worth celebratingThanksgiving is a pie lover’s holiday. At my house, all the usual suspects are in attendance: pecan, pumpkin, and apple à la mode.

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The Anatomy of a Pie Crust – Simply Put!

Found on “The Kitchn” site – a very basic introduction to the anatomy of a pie crust.

At its most basic, pie crust is nothing more than flour, fat, and liquid. But if that’s all it is, why is pie crust so notoriously difficult to make by hand? Let’s take a look:

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The Science of Baking

The Science of Baking
 
By Kelly Stewart

In the home kitchen, there are two kinds of people: cooks and bakers. For cooks, recipes are mere suggestions, flexible in their ingredients and proportions. For bakers, on the other hand, recipes are gospel truth, precise in their measurements and techniques.

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Tackle your fear of Baking

Fear of flour and lack of experience prompt the Star ‘s food editor to buy into a pie scheme that fooled her teacher
Kim Honey, Food Editor
 

The apple pie was picture-perfect. It had an impressive dome, an evenly browned crust and a sprinkling of coarse sugar over the top.

Being a neophyte baker, there was no way I could have made it myself. But at The Flaky Tart on Mount Pleasant Ave., just south of Eglinton, owner Madelaine Sperry was more than happy to take my pie plate and my order.

“You tell me how you want it to look and I’ll do it,” the affable baker says. “It doesn’t bother me.”

I ask for apple and direct her to make it look amateurish. I am going to present it to my neighbour Ed Lamb, a pie maker extraordinaire who had, about six months earlier, taught me and six other women on my street how to make apple pie.

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Phyllo Without Fear

by Diane Kochilas  

This article was first published in Saveur in Issue #24

The first time I saw a home cook ”open” phyllo the papery pastry dough essential to such classic Greek dishes as baklava and spanakópitta (spinach pie), I was visiting a monastery in Metsovo, a scenic mountain village in the Ípiros region of northwestern Greece. Ípiros is pítta country? Not pita, the ubiquitous Middle Eastern flat bread, but pítta, which is the word Greeks use to refer to a whole inventory of savory pies, whose ingredients are tucked between buttered or oiled layers of crisp phyllo. Continue reading

Safety in Bakeries – A Starting Point

Analysis of accidents in the bakery and flour confectionery industry has highlighted the following main types of risk and the preventative measures that may be taken to reduce them. They are by no means exhaustive and will vary depending on your own particular business. This is really just a starting point or guide. Continue reading

Pies for the Passerby – An experiment

Take These Pies, Please:
Inviting Thieves to a Window Where Art Imitates Lore

By ANDY NEWMAN

Clouds of apple scent drift across the concrete plaza, drawing young and old alike to the tiny white cottage recently sprung up in front of the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Scrunching noses to the windowpane, they peer past the gingham curtains, as if looking back in time, to see a woman in a dotted red dress and an apron leaning over a counter and rolling out a crust. Continue reading

Celebrate your Love with Pie

By Anne Kapler
The Gazette

Oh, how I would have loved to be part of the props department for the movie “Waitress.”

The movie, which was released in theaters in May and on DVD in late November, tells the story of Jenna (Keri Russell), a small-town diner waitress trapped in a bad marriage who consoles herself by making pies ? lots and lots of really delicious-looking pies.

According to a story from the Boston Globe, two “pie wranglers” (how’s that for a job title?) and one “pie mistress” made 250 pies for the film’s 30-day shoot. Continue reading

The 5 Stages of Pie

A tongue in cheek article found on the Culinate website, written by Caroline Cummins, 15 May 2007.

Who knew pie could get so emotional?

In On Death and Dying, her 1969 pop-psychology bestseller, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross outlined what later became known as the Five Stages of Grief. (They are not, so far as anyone has been able to determine, related to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.)

Everybody, Kübler-Ross theorized, goes through at least two of the five stages when dealing with a major life trauma, such as a divorce or serious illness. If you’ve just been given a terminal diagnosis, so the thinking goes, you will at some point experience the emotions associated with the stages.

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Vodka Pies

Found in the CHOW’s food media blog, The Grinder (8 October 2007)…

Vodka Pie (Pastry Shrinkage)

Pie-makers far and wide are talking excitedly about the November issue of Cook’s Illustrated in which writer J. Kenji Alt comes up with a novel solution for a persistent pastry problem (recipe only available for online subscribers). You see, the wetter pastry is, the easier it is to work with. But the more water you add, the more gluten is formed, which makes the pastry tough. Alt’s solution? Substitute vodka.

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