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    Pie Love
    Pie Love
    Pie Love
    Ebook333 pages2 hours

    Pie Love

    By Warren Brown and Joshua Cogan

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Baking basics plus inventive recipes for sweet and savory pies, galettes, pastry cremes, tarts, and turnovers!
     
    It was Warren Brown’s love of apple pie as a child that sparked his interest in baking—and now, as the founder of CakeLove bakeries, he’s delighted countless customers with his pie creations. In this book, he answers baker’s questions about making the perfect pie and includes recipes that range from sweet to savory.
     
    Mixing recipes for traditional fillings with fun, unique takes—blueberry maple pie, mango and strawberry tart, apple lasagna, shroom-ikopita, chicken potpie, Jamaican beef patties, and much more—PieLove also covers piecrusts and cream pies, for a wide range of delicious meal and dessert options.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStewart, Tabori Chang
    Release dateOct 1, 2013
    ISBN9781613124765
    Pie Love
    Author

    Warren Brown

    Warren Brown is an Author who has written in several genres from fiction to non-fiction. Warren is a certified Life Coach and Hypnotherapist. Warren completed his Advertising and Copywriting training through American Writers and Artists Inc. (AWAI).  I have been an Indie publisher for over eleven years now. I have been writing and publishing on the web since 1993. Website: https://warren4.wixsite.com/warren Medium: https://warrenauthor.medium.com/ Substack: https://warrenbrown.substack.com/

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    Book preview

    Pie Love - Warren Brown

    have this distinct memory of walking home from school sometime in the fourth or fifth grade. It was hot, and there was a hill, two streets to cross, and one yard before I was at my front door. The keys for the front door always got a little stuck, but I put up with that because it was faster than going around to the back. It was a straighter path to the kitchen—to the fridge—where the leftover pie was kept, waiting to become my after-school snack. Most of the time, there was enough for my sisters and me. But this lingering memory ends with an empty pie tin left out on the counter. I’ll never know who got to it first; it was probably my mom. She loves apple pie and always has it à la mode with Breyer’s vanilla ice cream. (Made with real vanilla bean, she would proudly say.) She’s the one who instilled in me my deep appreciation for real vanilla and all things gourmet. But that last slice, the delicious one I missed, I still want it.

    There’s a drive that comes from not getting what you want that never goes away. Apple pie will always be that dessert for me. Who knows if any of these recipes are as good as the slice that got away, but I’m having fun figuring it out. I hope you do too!

    FLOUR

    Unless otherwise noted, my flour of choice is General Mills brand unbleached all-purpose flour. Unlike with cakes, I don’t bother to sift and weigh the flour; for crusts, we’re aiming to mix a dense pastry anyway. If you have any of my other books or have seen me speak, you already know how strongly I feel about using a scale to get an accurate amount of flour for cake recipes. While a scale is your best bet for success when hedging against packing too much flour into a cup measure, it’s okay to have a little more flour than called for when mixing pie dough. So if you don’t have a scale or just want to keep the measuring simple, stick with the cup measures to scoop and level—but only with pie dough!

    There are a range of other grains called for with the different piecrusts covered in the first chapter of this book. Baking with a mix of grains creates a lovely balance of flavors and textures in each bite.

    • I especially like working with whole-wheat flour—either pastry flour or all-purpose whole-wheat flour—for the earthy bite it brings to a pie.

    • Flaxseed is great and brings a distinctly nutty flavor to the dough, but be sure to grind it immediately before use to take advantage of the healthful omega-3s found in the oils. These will have evaporated from preground store-bought flaxseed flour.

    • I dedicate a kitchen coffee grinder as a spice mill and gristmill for my grains.

    • Millet flour is great as a substitute for wheat flour in limited quantities to lower the gluten content. If it’s used exclusively in lieu of flour, the resulting crust will not have the same texture.

    • Polenta is very finely ground cornmeal, which brings an oven-toasted crunch to the crusts.

    SWEETENERS

    Superfine granulated sugar is the default for each recipe. It’s a little bit smaller than the standard granulated sugar and yields a finer texture with baked goods. Again, with pies, scooping the sugar works just as well as using a scale because we have a lot more fudge room. One cup weighs a little less than 8 ounces if you’re using a very sensitive scale, but rounding up will do.

    Occasionally, other sources of sweetness come into play. Here are a few alternatives to consider if you want to cut back on refined sugars in your baked goods.

    Maple sugars and syrups are perfect substitutes for refined sugar. Note that the distinct maple flavor may compete with other ingredients, so choose this sweetener only if you’re a real fan of maple syrup.

    Agave nectar, or syrup, is produced from the sap of the agave plant. Both light and dark versions are available. The light has a taste closer to honey; the dark, which is simply less filtered, is closer to maple syrup. The carbohydrate in agave nectar has a low glycemic index, making it a natural option for people who need to manage their blood sugar. It will work as a near one-for-one substitute for maple syrup and corn syrup, but the exact results can’t be guaranteed. When substituting for granulated sugar, add 1 tablespoon cornstarch per cup of agave (light or dark) and mix thoroughly in order to help thicken the syrup in the pie. Before you scoop the filling into the blind-baked piecrust, assess the texture of the filling. If it seems too runny, add more starch.

    Cane syrups, known as treacle in the U.K., are made from refining cane sugars or boiling cane sugar with water. Golden Syrup is a popular brand that’s also available here in the United States. Different viscosities and colors reveal varying levels of sweetness and flavors; the darker ones taste more like caramelized sugar syrups. They’re suitable substitutes for corn syrup if that doesn’t appeal to you.

    Honey works well, but add it after cooking the filling on the stove, especially if you’re using raw honey. The direct heat breaks down the sugars a bit, which dulls the sweetness and creates a slightly bitter flavor.

    Corn syrups—both light and dark—have a role in pies that is difficult to replace with other syrups. Pecan pie just isn’t the same without it. Of course, pie is made with sugar, so we’re not going to fuss about whether or not we should eat sugars derived from corn, but there is no need for the high-fructose variety.

    Molasses isn’t something I recommend using as the main sweetener in your pie, unless you’re making shoofly pie, such as the one on this page. Its flavor and characteristics are not interchangeable with cane sugar, maple sugar, or honey. And a little molasses goes a long way, so it can be added as a flavor accent by the teaspoon.

    Unrefined brown sugars, muscovado and turbinado, are hard to beat in terms of flavor. Neither is essential to make a wonderful pie, but both can add a depth of flavor if swapped in for one quarter to one third of the cane sugar called for in the recipe.

    BUTTER AND OTHER FATS

    Piecrust requires a healthy dose of fat. As always, unsalted butter is my go-to option for baking. Piecrust made with butter tastes homemade and has flavor notes that you just can’t mistake for anything else. We don’t have to be so exact with measuring here, either, so a scale isn’t necessary. An extra teaspoon or so of butter will just mean a slightly flakier crust. But temperature matters a great deal. If the butter isn’t cold and in small pieces when it’s added, it won’t disperse properly into the dry ingredients, and everything will become soggy—a catastrophe for piecrust. For the best results, use cold butter; cut it and rechill it before mixing it into the dough.

    I prefer 82 percent milk fat unsalted butter. I’m not particular to a specific brand; just be sure it’s not watery—some generic brands have an unhelpful amount of water.

    Vegetable shortening lends a great dynamic to piecrust. The only thing it lacks is taste. When I tried a crust with 50 percent butter and 50 percent shortening, it was as flaky as my heart’s desire, but I just didn’t taste much. Not until I tipped the scale with a 60 percent butter and 40 percent shortening mix did I find what I was looking for. The 60/40 Crust is a reliable workhorse that does well with certain cream and nut pies. When starting with a pound of flour, the best combination I found is four ounces butter to three ounces vegetable shortening, roughly 60 percent butter to 40 percent shortening.

    Vegan crusts are entirely feasible, whether made with plain vegetable shortening or a vegan shortening blend, but for the sake of taste, I highly recommend using a vegan shortening blend. The mix of oils helps create a background of flavors that gives the crust a better taste profile.

    Other vegetable sources of fat can be used to keep the piecrusts tender, including coconut oil and cocoa butter. For the most part, they’re experimental—more to have fun with in the kitchen. They certainly work, but if you don’t have the ingredient on hand and want to make that crust, just substitute in unsalted butter or vegetable shortening, and you’ll be on your way.

    Lard always has a place in pie making. There was a time when that place was probably first, but lard was eventually displaced with clever marketing ads promoting vegetable shortening and emphasizing the ick factor of baking with rendered pork fat. It makes a very tender, flaky crust that’s suitable for use with most pie fillings and doesn’t carry a detectable off flavor. Look for leaf lard, which is the highest quality, in international markets if it’s not available at your local grocer.

    FRUITS AND VEGETABLES

    Choose the best-looking, freshest fruits and vegetables for pies and tarts. Natural, organic, or pesticide-free foods look and taste better. Plus, it’s worth paying a little more for ingredients when you’ve made the choice to spend time in the kitchen. And when you can, shop locally so you can ask the farmers at local markets about their practices. Make sure that your efforts in the kitchen are matched with equally hardworking hands on the farms where they grow crops and raise livestock naturally, with your family’s health in mind. It may not be possible to shop entirely locally for everything you need to make the perfect pie, but source as much as you can from reputable vendors, and you won’t be let down.

    For ripening fruits, it’s always helpful to keep at least two of a kind in an enclosed space. I place fresh fruits under a cake dome. This way fruit flies don’t become a problem, the fruits have plenty of air to breathe, and gases that facilitate ripening can be passed between them. Placing fruit in a brown paper bag works just as well. For tarts, it’s best to start with fruits at the peak of their ripeness and not much beyond that. Ripe fruit will taste best, especially berries, but handle them carefully, since they can bruise easily. Most fruit will be fine in a pie, even if it’s a little past its prime—especially where a double crust is indicated. Just watch for a total breakdown of very fragile fruit, like peaches, that shouldn’t be cooked down after they’ve ripened.

    Thoroughly rinse your fruits and vegetables to remove as much dirt, debris, microbial pathogens, and chemicals used during cultivation as you can. Probably the best method for washing foods is to make a solution

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