Man With a Pan (20 page)

In my case, a girl whom I had known in high school, and whom I had loved from afar, was coming to visit me for a week in February. She lived in Milwaukee, and I had visited her for a weekend in October. Things were progressing. We had seen each other over Christmas, but only briefly, but she had not yet tasted one of my pies. I had plans to show her Boston and to woo her with pie.

Things would have gone perfectly if, (a) I had known anything about Boston to show her, which, despite the seven months I’d lived there, I didn’t, and (b) I hadn’t burned the first pie I baked for her (chocolate pecan) and then, in a completely different way, ruined the second pie I baked for her (apple). She questioned whether I had really ever owned a pie company, but she fell for me anyway. She moved to Boston and then we moved to New York, in a span of four months, and then another four months passed, but I still hadn’t baked a pie for her. Not successfully. It became an issue. Not a serious issue, but it was clear she wanted a pie, and it was clear I had no desire to make one.

I needed to stop making pies.

For the first time in what seemed like a long time, I saw a chance to define myself outside of the context of pies and the pie company. I was too caught up in graduate school and New York City and the experience of living with my girlfriend (who would soon become my fiancée, and then my wife) to think about making pies. She joked about my reluctance with friends of ours, displaced Austinites who knew about the company, who laughed with her when she described the debacle in Boston, and who made jokes of their own when she said, “He never owned a pie company, did he? It was a line, wasn’t it?” And soon I felt pressured, as if I were being forced to perform: playing the piano for guests or singing that song I learned in school for my grandmother.

Thanksgiving was fast approaching, though. We had invited friends to our house for dinner. For dessert, she insisted, I was making pies. The pies were fine. They were good, I’m sure, though honestly, I don’t remember them. I can guarantee they weren’t nearly as good as my pies are now. I can guarantee they weren’t as good as the pies I made that very next Thanksgiving, because even after just one year living with the woman who would become my wife, something changed.

I stopped making pies, and I started baking.

What had started out as a lark, a means to escape the daily grind of office work, and a way to meet people (and girls) has since become something personal and particular. I realized that my ability to bake, and not the fact that I had owned a pie company, was what mattered. In Austin, I rode the coattails of owning the Clarksville Pie Company, and not until I left the company did I begin to focus more energy on the pies themselves. (Not that I don’t ride those pie-company coattails still. Even now, that I owned a pie company makes its way onto my CV for every job I apply for. The novelist Ben Marcus, another baker and a professor at Columbia, once remarked that my having owned a pie company was the main reason I was admitted into graduate school. He said it jokingly, but I don’t doubt that it is at least half-true.)

What’s more, the December after that first Thanksgiving, I proposed to my girlfriend, and a year and a half later, we married. Maybe it’s a cliché, but the love of a good woman is no joke. It frees a man up. All the creative energy once expended in the pursuit of love was diverted into writing and baking. And so I wrote and baked and cooked more, not to impress my wife, whom I had already impressed enough to marry me, but because I had time and energy and I had her; without her, none of it would have been as important, as vital.

Now I’m uncommonly protective and critical of the pies I bake. I pay particular attention to who slices them (I do) and who lifts the slices out of the pie pan (this is also me, if possible, though at times overeager relatives will dive in even as I’m not halfway through slicing the pie), in part because no one else seems able to cut a piece of pie without screwing up the rest of the pieces, or to divide a pie into equal portions, but mostly because I want to witness the slice’s release. I want to see how well the pie, particularly if it’s a fruit or custard pie, holds together when the first slice is separated from its companions. I want to check the bottom crust, to see if it browned and became crisp as it should. And the first piece of pie I eat I poke and prod, taking small, sampling bites, first the filling, then the crust, then the two together, and even now, I’m fully satisfied only half the time. I’ve settled on a crust recipe, finally: all butter, no water, but cream as the liquid. I can make it in my sleep, and it is the flakiest, tenderest, most flavorful crust I’ve tasted, and it bakes up brown and beautiful.

What’s more, pies led to other desserts: cakes, cupcakes,
pot de crème,
crème brûlée, ice cream, homemade ice cream sandwiches, s’mores made with homemade marshmallows and graham crackers, and soufflés, and any number of other sweet confections. And then beyond desserts, pies led to good food in general. In my family, I am the go-to guy for sustenance and the pleasure of eating. I am the one in the kitchen, and again, I can count on one or two hands the meals from our kitchen that weren’t made by me.

To be fair to my wife, she has tossed her hat into the ring, most notably when we thought we were going to bake our own wedding cake (an idea that lasted all of one four-layer cake) and again after our daughter was born, when becoming a mother awoke her inner Betty Crocker (though a Betty who liked to decorate confections rather than bake them). These were good, solid efforts, but in the end, an existence in the kitchen feels natural to me, not her.

Of course, nobody at home calls me the Pie Guy. I do so many other things. I shop, make dinner, put together lunches, wash clothes, play dress-up. But I still bake pies often enough that I wade into them recipeless and fearless. They’re the best pies my wife or I have tasted, and more times than not, it seems to me that baking a pie is the best thing I can do. When faced with the prospect of daily life—deadlines to meet, tenth graders to teach, that flat tire, the one that’s been in my trunk since August 2009, to fix—baking a pie is sometimes the only thing I want to do. I bake pies for my wife’s students and for holidays and for dinner parties and for my parents to take with them when they visit my sister in North Carolina, and sometimes for no reason at all except that it is always a good idea to have a pie on the counter.

The Key Lime Pie Bed

Recipe File

Pie Crust

Makes enough dough for 1 9-inch pie crust

This recipe is borrowed and adapted from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s recipe made with heavy cream, from
The Pie and Pastry Bible.

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 stick unsalted butter, divided into 5 tablespoons and 3 tablespoons, frozen and cubed
5 to 7 tablespoons heavy whipping cream

In a food processor, combine the flour and salt. Add 5 tablespoons of the frozen, cubed butter to the processor bowl and process for 1 to 2 minutes or until the mixture resembles coarse meal.

Then add 3 tablespoons of the frozen, cubed butter to the processor bowl and pulse for 1-second intervals, 4 or 5 times, until the butter is pea-size.

Empty the mixture into a second bowl. Add 5 to 7 tablespoons of heavy whipping cream and, quickly, with a fork or a whisk or your fingers, combine the flour mixture and cream until a dough forms.

Wrap the dough in plastic wrap or place in a Ziploc bag and refrigerate for at least 20 minutes but no more than 1 hour, or else the dough will be too hard to roll out.

Because there is no water in this crust and a lot of fat, it is necessary for this dough to be rolled out between plastic wrap or wax paper, preferably plastic wrap, as wax paper tends to create creases in the dough as you’re rolling it out. Roll out the dough with a rolling pin to form a crust that is about 10 inches around and approximately ⅛ inch thick. Place the wrapped, rolled-out dough into the freezer for 2 to 3 minutes, or in the refrigerator for 5 to 10 minutes to rechill the butter and make the crust easier to pull away from the wrap.

Pull the crust away from the wrap on one side and place it gently into a pie plate, then remove the other piece of Saran Wrap and press the pie crust into the plate, fluting or crimping the edges as you see fit.

Because of the relatively short baking time of the Mexican Chocolate Pie, you should prebake the pie crust. (I suggest you prebake the pie crust for any pie that will spend less than 45 minutes in the oven.) In order to do this, you will need a piece of parchment paper and pie weights, which you can purchase, though dried beans work just as well and can be reused. (Just make sure you do not try to cook them after you have used them as weights.)

Preheat the oven to 425°F at least 20 minutes before baking. Line the pie crust in the pie plate with the parchment paper and then fill with weights up to the very edge of the pie plate, pushing them well up the sides of the parchment. Bake for 20 minutes. Lift the parchment and weights out of the pie plate. Prick the bottom of the crust lightly with the tines of a fork. Return the pie crust to the oven for 5 to 10 minutes, or until a pale golden brown, checking periodically to make sure the bottom of the crust isn’t bubbling up.

Mexican Chocolate Pie

This pie is based on Mexican hot chocolate, or those little Abuelita chocolate disks that you can make into hot chocolate, and includes a touch of cinnamon and some chipotle and ancho pepper for a bit of heat. When just out of the oven, it has a kind of airy, mousselike, melt-on-your-tongue texture, and as it cools, it fudges up, becoming a bit more dense and brownielike. It’s got that nice, thin, crackly brownie film on top of it, which we love.

It used to be the best-selling pie when I owned the pie company, and then I lost the recipe and tried to make it from memory and it didn’t work. The sugar didn’t completely dissolve and there was a grainy mouthfeel to it, so I talked it over with my friend the bread baker (who also makes pastries and desserts) and we figured out that I probably wasn’t whipping the eggs and sugar for long enough. So after a few tests, it’s back in the stable.

2 eggs
1 cup sugar
¾ cup flour
½ teaspoon cinnamon
⅛ teaspoon ground ancho powder
⅛ teaspoon ground chipotle powder
2 sticks butter
1 cup chocolate chips
1 9-inch pie crust, par-baked (or prebaked) for about 20 minutes

Preheat the oven to 375°F.

Using the whisk for a stand mixer, whisk the eggs and sugar for 4 minutes on medium-high speed, or until the sugar and eggs are well whipped and fully incorporated.

Meanwhile, melt the butter on top of the stove and keep it warm.

Lowering the speed to medium low, add the flour and spices to the mixer and mix the dry ingredients with the sugar and eggs until incorporated. Turn off the mixer. Add the chocolate chips. Bring the butter to a light boil, and then, while it’s still very hot, pour the butter into the mixing bowl and let stand for 1 to 2 minutes. Mix on a low speed until the butter is incorporated with the rest of the batter, increasing the speed as the butter is incorporated and the chocolate begins to melt, until the batter is a dark chocolate color and most if not all of the chocolate pieces are melted.

Pour the filling into the pie crust.

Bake in the preheated oven for 30 to 40 minutes, or until the center of the pie is set.

On the Shelf

The Pie and Pastry Bible,
Rose Levy Beranbaum. This was the first thing I bought when I jumped into the pie company. I knew I wanted to change some of the recipes and I didn’t have much of an idea how to do this, so I looked to this text for basic recipes and built variations from there. After the company dissolved, I used this to devise my pie-crust recipe. Other favorite pie recipes: open-faced blueberry pie with crème fraîche, open-faced apple pie, and fresh strawberry and rhubarb tart.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking,
Julia Child.

This is a beautiful and interesting book to simply flip through and read. In truth, there isn’t a lot of French cooking I’ve mastered with this, not yet, but in it there is a brilliant apple custard tart that is a standby for me for dinner parties.

The Art of Eating,
M. F. K. Fisher, and
Domesticity,
Bob Shacochis. These two books came into my life at about the same time, just after I left college, and introduced me to food writing as an art. They also taught me to think of food separate from the food I had grown up with—my mother’s cooking—and this led me to cook on my own and then experiment with cooking. The experiments, as often as not, failed miserably.

Cook’s Illustrated.

I stick to the savory foods from this magazine most of the time, finding the desserts—and the baked goods especially—often time consuming and unnecessarily difficult and ultimately unsatisfying. Their cupcake recipes (yellow and dark chocolate), however, are quite easy and are maybe my favorite cupcakes to make.

Jacques Torres’ A Year in Chocolate,
Jacques Torres.