It's Thanksgiving Pie Time, featuring Stacey Mei Yan Fong

Episode Transcript

Thanksgiving pies 

David: This season is brought to you by Plugra premium European style butter, made using a slow churn process. Look for Plugra wherever fine butters are sold.  

I finally decided to do the most passive aggressive thing and write an article about it in Bon Appetit, and then all of a sudden I got my pies back. 

Jessica: From King Arthur Baking Company, this is Things Bakers Know. I'm Jessica Battilana, King Arthur staff editor.  

David: And I'm David Tamarkin, editorial director at King Arthur Baking. And today we're talking all about Thanksgiving pies. 

Jessica: Yes. I am so psyched about this episode, and honestly, if I had a crystal ball, I would predict this is going to be one of our most listened to episodes. It's a fraught topic for a lot of people. It's a fraught topic. I think people have a lot of passion about Thanksgiving pies. They have a lot of anxiety about Thanksgiving pies. 

David: Mm-hmm.  

Jessica: Thanksgiving in general.  

David: Yes, yes, and yes.  

Jessica: And honestly, there is something that I find very sort of sweet about imagining people, you know, from coast to coast eating more or less the same meal, and certainly like the same pies, right? Like we're here to talk about pie. And I think I do like all of those pies. 

I, I like all of the classic Thanksgiving pies. And I always think it's interesting because media outlets are always trying to push alternative pies this time of year, right? Like they need some fresh ideas so they can't just like rehash the same old pies. They have to come up with something new. And I always feel, frankly, pretty skeptical of those new pie recipes. 

Like, is this the year I'm gonna make a lemon chess pie for Thanksgiving? It is not.  

David: That doesn't even seem that wild, lemon chess pie. It's not even that wild.  

Jessica: But I'm not gonna do it. Or if you think like I'm only gonna have this pumpkin pie, you know, once a year, which really is sort of the case in our household, then I just wanna be assured that it's gonna be a good one. 

David: I mean, pies are tricky and the fact that a lot of us don't eat these pies except for on Thanksgiving, to your point, it does put an added amount of pressure on the pies that we make, and I gotta, here's my first tip for everybody. If you're feeling pressure, if you're stressed out, your pie is going to feel that stress and it's not going to come out as well. 

I mean, pies are like bees and like wild animals. They can sense your fear and they, and they just, they just feed and they feed on it. I think it's true. It's, it's not gonna turn out. So every, the first thing everybody needs to do right now, a couple weeks before Thanksgiving is just take a deep breath. 

It's gonna be fine.  

Jessica: It's gonna be fine. It's just one meal, you know?  

David: And also there's a lot of tension, at least in my life, there's been a lot of tension about who makes the Thanksgiving pies. For many, many years, I always made the pies for Thanksgiving. I don't know how it happened. It was just assigned to me. 

I don't know if I did a good job with them. I don't know. I was a teenager when I started, but it was my thing and I definitely owned that and felt a lot of ownership over it and felt very proud of it and excited about it.  

Jessica: Mm-hmm.  

David: And then one year I come home for Thanksgiving to find that somehow, my brother-in-law has been given the pie assignment, and not only has he been given the pie assignment, he's already made the pies, so there's no way I can take it back. And from that year on for the next 10 years, he held that assignment and I seethed with rage until I finally decided to do the most passive aggressive thing and write an article about it in Bon Appetit, which told him and the rest of my family how mad I was about it, and then all of a sudden I got my pies back.  

Jessica: Wow. It's like public therapy. That's amazing.  

David: We'll put the, I'll put the link to that article in the show notes. Just in case anybody wants to read it. Yeah.  

Jessica: That's amazing. Well, obviously you don't have such an ironclad hold on it as I do, but I think everyone listening could take a few lessons from us today. 

'cause we have a lot of tactical tips from years spent making pies and also just, you know, talking to great pie makers. I wanna give people some tactical advice here. So what do you think is like your number one tip for people that are embarking on their pie journey? How can we help them?  

David: So, and I feel like I really have gone on a pie journey these past few years helping to produce our on demand class on pies. 

And the one thing they kept on saying over and over again is you have to chill your pie dough and you have to chill it at many different steps. First of all, you want all your ingredients and all your tools to be cool when you were first putting together your dough. I make my dough by hand, but I chill the metal bowl I'm using, I chill my pastry cutter, obviously I freeze my butter, not like for too long. I put it in the freezer for about half an hour or so. I freeze everything, but then after I make my dough, I never go from making my dough straight into rolling it out. I'm chilling between each of those steps. 

Now, I might be going overboard because my worst fear is dough shrinkage because there's been so many times that I have gotten that pie dough looking so pretty in the pan, it goes in the oven, and then it just all like shrinks down. The steps that help when you're chilling your dough are chilling it as a disc in the fridge. Yep. Letting it rest. It's about letting it rest as much as it is about letting it chill.  

Jessica: Okay.  

David: Then roll it out. Then at that point I put it in the pan.  

Jessica: Yeah.  

David: And I shape it, I crimp it, whatever. And that's when I do the, I think the most important chill. I let that chill in the fridge. 

That could be 12 hours, that could be 24 hours. Yeah. To really keep their shape and keep that crimping, which is really the most important thing to me. 'cause I'm in this for the aesthetics.  

Jessica: Of course. You're doing it for the gram, right? I support the getting ahead and obviously making your pie crust ahead is like one great way to get ahead. 

One place that I, that I think could be optimized is people will make their discs of pie dough. And then they'll freeze them as discs of pie dough. So what I prefer to do is like you, I make my disc of dough. I'll refrigerate it and then I'll roll it out and put it into the pie dish and then freeze it in the pie tin because then it's like ready to go. 

You can do that a month in advance if you wanted to. And just put the whole pie into a like plastic bag and twist, tie it so it doesn't get freezer burn, and then they're just waiting there for you. I love that. That is really smart. It's better than freezing the discs because that just is like, that doesn't actually get you that far ahead. 'cause then you're just waiting again.  

David: It gets you ahead, but then it also sets you back later. So I, that's a great tip. I think you, you recently made a pie and put it in our group chat at work and it was absolutely stunning. And one thing you said to us here at work is I followed all the steps. I followed all the rules, and one of your rules was metal pie tin, and you had a bunch of other really great rules in there as well. 

Jessica: Yeah. Which I have learned since working at King Arthur and now it's like I deploy all of the things. So all of the things for me is metal pie tin.  

David: Check 

Jessica: Well, chilled dough pastry  

David: Check 

Jessica: I bake my pies on my baking steel or baking stone if you have that. So I set the pie plate right directly on there. 

I usually put a sheet of parchment to avoid the bubble over. That sometimes happens. So pizza stone or steel, parchment, pie pan right on it because then it gets that like nice steady heat from the bottom, which helps prevent the soggy bottom crust, which is a scourge of pie bakers everywhere. The other thing I do to prevent that is I use this magical substance called crust dust. 

David: You love crust dust.  

Jessica: I love crust dust. So crust dust is equal parts by volume, all-purpose flour and sugar. That's all it is. So you have your rolled out crust, it's in your pie tin, unbaked, and I sprinkle the bottom of the pie with a generous amount of crust dust, and that will absorb the juices. This is not obviously for custard pie. These are for the fruit pies that will absorb the juices and help keep that bottom crust crispier.   

David: Do you find that it leaves like a layer of floury gumminess? 

Jessica: I don't notice it. 

David: Okay.  

Jessica: Nope. You don't notice it. It does feel a little belt and suspenders. Like the metal pan. The piece of stone. The crust dust. 

David: The chilled crust.  

Jessica: The chilled crust. Yeah. And also, last but not least, you have to bake your pie long enough.  

David: Maybe the most important thing.  

Jessica: So many anemic pies in the world. And that, shaken, nothing makes me more shaken  

David: Nothing makes me more angry or more sad.  

Jessica: Yeah. S-angry. More disappointed. 

Yeah. It takes a long time to bake a pie. I mean, an hour. An hour, 75 minutes, and I start mine hotter. Do you start yours, like higher temperature and then drop the temperature?  

David: It's not something I do for every pie. I would do it if the recipe calls for it. Yeah, but you, do you think it's, you think it's good for every pie? 

Jessica: I mean, not custard pies, but every double crusted pie. Yeah, I do. I start hotter, I start at 400, and then I drop it down. Mm-hmm. And then I just go until it is really brown. And if it's a fruit pie till like you see some bubbling.   

David: That's another great tip I learned from the baking school. One, I finally found out what piping hot means. Because that's, that's piping. Yes. When the fruit is bubbling, almost like steam coming out of a locomotive.  

Jessica: Yeah. Wow. In a cartoon, you know? Yeah.  

David: When it's coming out, like in a kind of like straight shot and it's bubbling, that's when, you know it's reached a point where a lot of the water has steamed out and it's thickened. 

Jessica: Yeah 

David: It’s piping hot and you need to look for it to be piping.  

Jessica: Yeah, like a drippy, messy pie. Like pies, I don't think in my mind are, should be picture perfect. I think it should be like a little rustic.  

David: Totally, totally  

Jessica: Set yourself free.   

David: You know, this is what I said at the beginning of the episode. Take a deep breath, set yourself free, follow all of these very rigid tips we just gave you, and your pie will come out great. 

Jessica: Relax. But also don't let us down.  

David: It's a, it's a learning curve and you and I have are lucky to have been baking pies for a while, and I feel very lucky to have been baking pies at King Arthur and learning from all these people. And I just will say to anybody out there who has, who feels pie challenged, you can get much better. 

And all these tips that Jessica just laid out, they really do work and it does require a little bit of equipment. But you know what? You're gonna use that pie tin so much.  

Jessica: Yeah. But we will put all the King Arthur resources of which there are so many in the show notes. You can, you know, at your leisure. Dig into the treasure trove. 

You know, I think you sort of brought up a nice point too, David, like you and I have baked a lot of pies in our lives, but still, there's always this opportunity to learn new things through participating in the on-demand class and, and watching that come together. I've absorbed new things about pie making. 

Just from watching the cooks in the test kitchen. There are always more opportunities to learn things as a baker, which is what makes it fun and exciting, and it's also part of why I was really excited to have today's guest come on, because Stacey Mei Yan Fong is a pie pro in a totally different league from you and I. 

David: True.  

Jessica: Um, she is the author of the award-winning book, 50 Pies, 50 States. She lives in Brooklyn, New York now, but she was born in Singapore, raised in Indonesia and Hong Kong, and calls this cookbook, which she wrote while she was waiting for her green card, a love letter to America. And Stacey has a lot of tips and tricks and thoughts and ideas about pies, both sweet and savory, and she was so much fun to talk to and so generous with her knowledge, so I'm thrilled to have her on Things Bakers Know. 

So this is, our episode is all about Thanksgiving pies, because I think that is a topic that people have a lot of passion about, also a lot of anxiety about. And so I thought, who better than you, a total pie expert to come on and talk to us, to assuage our fears, to give us some tips and tricks. But you were not always a pie baker. Is that right? Like you came to pie a little later in life? 

Stacey: I came to pie a little later in life. I designed handbags for 10 years. And I just baked and cooked on the side as something that was like my stress reliever. And I kind of got deeply into baking pies when I started this project called 50 Pies, 50 States when I was in the process of applying for my green card. And so I put myself through Pie Bootcamp, and then because the universe does its thing, I ended up losing my job in fashion during the pandemic. And at that time, I had baked many pies. And so I cold emailed a bunch of bakeries in the city and Four & Twenty Blackbirds, which is my favorite pie shop in New York, they ended up giving me a job and I ended up baking at Four & Twenty Blackbirds for two years. So then I went into real pie bootcamp.  

Jessica: So, but I wanna back up for a second, because you grew up. Let's see. You're born in Singapore. Which is not really like a pie eating country as far as I know. Not a pie country. 

Stacey: Nope.  

Jessica: And then you lived for a time in Indonesia and Hong Kong. Also not big on pie.  

Stacey: I think big on pie. Not in the traditional way Americans think about pie. So for me, growing up, I knew what apple pie was like. I was very ingrained in American culture and listened to a lot of country music as a young child. 

But like I knew pie as like a completely savory thing. Sure. Because both Singapore and Hong Kong were British colonies. Like for me it was like steak and kidney pies or even Australian meat pies. I played rugby most of middle school and high school, and so like after rugby, we would eat like a meat pie. 

And it wasn't till I came to college here that I discovered pie really like, runs the gamut here as a dessert. Like, I was like, what in the world is a grasshopper pie? And like, why is it the same color as toothpaste? You know? It was like such a wonderful world of discovery for me, like moving to the states. 

Jessica: I love that. And I, I mean, clearly now you have made a lot of pies in your life. A lot. 

Stacey: Yeah, I, I average about at least like 60 a year. 60 or more a year. It's lot of pie. It's more than one a week.  

Jessica: That's more than one a week. Yeah. Stacey, what is your preferred pie crust and do you have any tips, tricks, pep talks, advice for the panicked people out there? 

Stacey: I feel like the biggest thing I can say is I made terrible crust for like six months. You know, you have to get through that terrible part of it.  

Jessica: Mm-hmm.  

Stacey: And it's part of the learning experience, you know? And like whenever you write a recipe for pie crust, it's really hard to be like one cup of water or you know, like, it's hard to say because like, is it a really humid day? You're gonna add a little less water. Is it a really dry day? You're gonna add a little more water. And so my advice is. To always start by making pie crust by hand. Like once you get comfortable with like knowing what it feels like and you kind of have those like sense cues where like, oh, the crumb is gonna look like this, or it's gonna get a little more yellow from the butter, that's when you can move on to using a food processor. 

Like I wouldn't start there, like, I feel the beauty of baking and why people like it, also hate it is that it's a very like all consuming, tactile thing, but that's what's also so beautiful about it because the world is so distracting now. Like you might as well spend a little time in your kitchen and like take a moment and just like settle and make crusts. 

And also the best thing you can do is just chill, as in calm down. You're not doing brain surgery. And also use your fridge. Like your fridge is your best friend. Yeah. If the butter's getting soft, put it in the fridge. Uh, if you can feel the dough getting kind of weird, put it in the fridge. Mm-hmm. And like, take a lap around. 

Take a turn about the room, and then come back to it and it'll be okay. You know, like there's lots of solves. I think, you know, the minute things start getting too wet or things start getting too warm, like that's when people panic. But you literally have a, a beautiful icebox that's right next to you, that can like save you a little bit. Yeah. It's true. Pie is kind of a lesson in patience. Like there's the actual active time of you making the filling or making the dough isn't very long, but you wait a lot. Like, you wait for your dough to rest, you wait for, I like to freeze my pies before I bake them in the oven. 

That kind of helps with the crimps holding um, as it bakes. And then you also have to wait a little while before you cut into your pie or else like a lasagna it's just gonna leak everywhere.   

Jessica: Totally  

Stacey: You know, they take a long time to bake. 

Jessica: Like to fully bake a pie, they take a long time to bake. 

Stacey: I feel like pies are always lying. Pies are always lying, like, and everybody's oven is so different. Sometimes the pie's gonna take an hour. Sometimes the pie's gonna take two. And I think once you learn the kind of visual and smell cues, like that's kind of when you get really deep into it. And yeah, like it's nice to have a little patience or learn a little patience. Everything comes so fast to us. Like we can order something and get it the next day. Like it's kind of nice to just like get lost in it and like slow down a little.  

Jessica: Yeah. One of the things that I love the most about like following some of your content on your Instagram account is that you don't just post your picture-perfect pies. 

I mean, you do post your picture-perfect pies, but you also have like the imperfect pies, I think you call them uggo pies. And I just love that because I think it's so relatable for people. You know, making uggo pie that still tastes really good is probably what a lot of folks do.  

Stacey: I, I also think that there's this like weird sense that everything has to be like perfect and well edited and like well put together and that's just kind of not how life is. 

No. Like not everything I put in the oven comes out perfect, even though I've been baking pie for as long as I have, like. Things are gonna suck sometimes like and things do.  

Jessica: And I think understatement of the year. 

Stacey: Yes. Uhhuh, right? Truly. And I think it's such a disservice too as a person that like is in the world existing baking pie to be like, everything I do is perfect, like portraying this image that doesn't exist. 

And it's also like, yeah, today I had a bad day. Yeah. I was kind of in a weird mood and you could tell because my bake came out bad and then. Guess what? Tomorrow's another day. I've got more pie crust in the fridge and everything will be okay.  

Jessica: Yeah. Now you must get like really pressed into service this time of year, like Thanksgiving time of year, because I'm sure like you probably have people texting you questions, but then I imagine if you go to Thanksgiving gatherings, like you're on the hook to bring pies.  

Stacey: Yes. I'm always on the hook. A thing that I've done the past few years, if I, is I open up a hotline on my Instagram, and I let people DM me or like write me an email if they have a question or they have an idea, and I just like offer my services for free. I've gotten to meet like so many wonderful people on the internet that are like, I have this bing bong pie question, and I'm like, okay. 

Like I'll try and answer it like the best that I can or reach out to another baker. I know that might have a better idea than me. So, yeah. 

Jessica: I love that. I mean, I think between, like for our listeners out there, between the King Arthur Baker's Hotline and your Instagram Hotline, like any questions people have about Thanksgiving pie we like, we will have people sorted like we are there for, we are, operators are standing by. Stacey, it's such a treat to talk to you and I love that our readers can find you on Instagram. It's your handle is just @StaceyMeiYanFong. Great, and we'll put that in the show notes. So you're gonna get an absolute deluge of questions now that you've said the  

Stacey: I'm ready. 

And then I will also link you to my really good country holiday playlist that I think 

Jessica: Oh my gosh, I also love country music and I plan to listen that while I prepare my Thanksgiving feast. It's such a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for being so generous with your knowledge and your time and, um, I hope you'll come back and chat with us again. 

Stacey: Of course this was an absolute joy. Happy holidays.  

Jessica: Happy holidays. 

Naturally, our Thanksgiving pie episode is brought to you by all of our favorite pie tools from sturdy metal pie pans, which honestly are the very best ones for getting a pie with a truly crisp and browned crust to versatile rolling pins to instant clear gel, which is our go-to way to thicken pie fillings another secret ingredient. 

We've got everything you need to bake your best pies this season.  

David: My favorite secret pie ingredient, Jessica, is sparkling sugar because you put it all over your pie crust and it doesn't melt, and then you pull the pie out of the oven and it has so much glamor. It's beautiful.  

Jessica: You're very fancy. You just dress your pies up for the holidays. 

It's the holidays. I love it. You can find all of our pie must-haves in our online shop at kingarthurbaking.com 

It is time for our next segment. My favorite segment, Ask The Bakers. We got a lot of questions for Ask the Bakers this week, but if you have a question for Ask the Bakers, we wanna hear it. Head to kingarthurbaking.com/podcast. Record a voice message. We might end up using it on the show. That's kingarthurbaking.com/podcast. 

David: Of course, if you have a baking question that can't wait for the podcast, you can always reach out to the Bakers Hotline via phone, email, or online chat. Just go to kingarthurbaking.com/bakers-hotline. That's kingarthurbaking.com/bakers-hotline or call us at (855) 371-2253. That's 2 2 5 3 as in BAKE. 

It's a very busy time for the hotline.  

Jessica: It sure is, but let's listen to the questions and see if we can save the, um, the hotline folks some labor by answering some questions. 

Caller: My favorite pie for Thanksgiving is pumpkin pie by far. I love it so much. I started making it with fresh pie pumpkins years ago because my uncle has a farm north of San Francisco and we always go up and visit during harvest time in the fall, and he gives us a bunch of pie pumpkins, so we changed from can to a real pumpkin. Um, and that's been a really nice shift. So delicious. And I'm wondering from you both, um, iIf I were to tweak my pumpkin pie a little bit this year, just do something, not a major change, but a little twist in adding special flavor, what would you suggest? Thank you.  

Jessica: She hasn't heard us spout off about how fresh pumpkin puree is just a waste.  

David: I mean, but it sounds like she's got a special thing going. She's got work out. She's on a journey. Yeah.  

Jessica: Yeah, she's on a pie journey. It was interesting too. I like how she says, I want a little tweak, nothing major, because as we said, I feel like the Thanksgiving meal is so codified. 

People don't want and in fact are like offended by big switches. She mentioned that it is a pie that's easy to make gluten free, which is true. You know, one of the things I was thinking about is varying the crust, and obviously if you are baking gluten free, you have to, you know, factor that in. But I often make a pumpkin pie with a sort of alternative crust. 

You know, I'll do Biscoff cookies, which are not gluten-free, but gingersnaps. There are gluten-free ginger snaps out there and I think that is really nice. Or chocolate cookie crust. Also, you could do those in combination with like a little bit of ground nuts, I think would be nice just to add some flavor. 

David: Yeah, I love your ideas. And to the custard part, I would just grate in, uh, a lot of fresh ginger. I wouldn't do too much. I would maybe do a teaspoon of fresh ginger. Yeah. Grated. Yeah. Um, I think that would make a big impact. It'd be really nice and help keep the pie feel decadent, but also a little bit lighter. 

And if you want to go in the other direction to more decadent, we do have a recipe on the site, which I love for a pumpkin cheesecake pie, which is not a pumpkin flavored cheesecake. It's a layer of pumpkin pie and a layer of cheesecake. It's really beautiful. You've got that kind of stripy look to it and I've made that and it's great. Yeah, it really makes it more robust.  

Jessica: And I also think just making the custard, filling ahead of time, you know, really allowing the, those spices, whether dry spices or the fresh ginger, some like an opportunity to sort of bloom in the custard. And, you know, we didn't talk about this yet, but I also think people don't really consider flavoring their whipped cream as much as I think that they should. 

And so like a coffee whipped cream on top of a gluten-free pumpkin pie sounds really good to me. Or a maple like, or even a little bit of bourbon in there. So I think you can have the aftermarket additions that would be really nice and flavorful and you know, fat carries flavor really well. 

It sounds good. I like coffee and pumpkin a lot. Yeah, even a chocolate whipped cream would be good on top of a pumpkin pie. Then also for the purists, I don't have to put it on. So I think that would be fun to try any of those things. And I think they're subtle enough that, uh, if you have some staunch traditionalists at your table, they're not gonna be offended. 

Let's go to our next question.  

Caller: Hi, my name is Aita and I'm from Atlanta, and I had a question about blind baking when you are baking pies. Um, I was wondering if I should invest in some pie weights or if you had some best practices on using dry beans or uncooked rice. I just sort of feel like I'm wasting uncooked beans and rice when I'm using it during a blind bake. Um, or maybe I am just doing it totally wrong. So any information would be really helpful. Thank you.  

Jessica: Mm, mm-hmm.  

David: We have thoughts about this, right? I have so many thoughts about this. A lot. Lot of thoughts about pie weights.  

Jessica: I do because pie, a shrinking pie crust is such a terrible and dispiriting thing to have happen to you. 

So you know what we're talking about here is that some pies require you to bake it once before you fill it, so you get the crust fully cooked. That often is the case. You know, some of them, it's pies, like a custard pie where the custard filling gets added afterwards, things like that. So you have to start with a pre-baked pie shell and man, I have tried, I've tried a lot of things. 

So what I will say that I use, because of my Yankee thrift, my noted Yankee thrift, is that I do use beans, actually a combination of beans and rice. Because they're relatively inexpensive. Very inexpensive, and you can really fill, so I crumple up a piece of parchment. I line the inside of my unbaked pie shell, and then I fill it like right to the brim with my rice and bean combination. 

I use those same rice and bean combo over and over again. I mean, the ones I have are probably. I don't know, 10 years old. I just like dump them back into the canister once they've cooled and I use them over and over again. That's what I do. But there are other ways I wanna shout out. This new product that we're selling at King Arthur from our employee owners of the company developed this product and then sent it to be manufactured. And I think it's very cool, so it's, they're silicone pie weights instead of the ceramic ones, which are just a little bit easier to deal with, easier to wash if they get gummy. But what I think is really, you can put 'em in the dishwasher. You could put 'em in the dishwasher. 

They come in this pouch kind of like, you know, like a little drawstring,  

David: Like a net of muscles.  

Jessica: Thank you. Like a net of muscles. Mm-hmm. Is that, how is that a really relatable? 

David: We're on the east coast. Yeah.  

Jessica: So you lay this pouch in there with the weights in it, and then when it comes time to pull it out, you know what I normally do is like grab the hot parchment paper and like try not to spill. 

But this you just, you just cinch up your little silicone pouch with your pie beans inside of it and lift the whole thing out. And there are enough pie beans in there to actually fill it to the brim. And that plus the pouch itself, I think helps. Keep the sides where they're supposed to be.  

David: Yeah. 

It's a great product and it's, it's one of the options. Rice and beans is another great option, but the key is find something that you can reuse and fill all the way to the top of your pie tin. 

Jessica: I have one more hot tip though for this. Okay. We recently published a blog by PJ Hamel, legendary King Arthur employee owner, and she showed us this technique for baking your pie crust upside down. 

David: Oh yeah, that's cool.  

Jessica: So you have your metal pie dish. Then you put in your pie dough, crimp it, do whatever you wanna do. And then you set a second metal pie dish nested in the unbaked crust. Then you invert the whole thing so it's crust up rather than edge up. And you bake it. It's bottom up.  

It's bottom up. So you've got gravity working on your side rather than working against gravity. And then you have it like, you know, because it's sandwiched between the two metal pie pants, both of which we said earlier, conduct heat. Well you get like a nice toasty shell. It does slightly flatten your crimp, but like you can't see it on a trotting horse. 

It's fine. And that's, I think that's pretty fun. You do need two metal pie pants.  

David: Yeah, it's a very cool method. I love it.   

Jessica: And you don't need any pie weights for that. Anyway. So all of these things I think, work well, but yes, just get it filled to the brim or try the inverted method and shrinking pie crust will be a thing of the past. 

Let's hear our next listener question.  

Caller: Hi, my name's Lauren. I'm a hobby baker and I tend to bake a lot more when I go home, uh, and visit my family for the holidays. And my apple pie always turns out super runny. So I was wondering if you have any tips or tricks for how to avoid that.  

David: I'm gonna pass this to you, Jessica, because you are the apple pie queen. 

Jessica: Oh, that's nice. I don't think of myself as the queen, but maybe the duchess or. All right, I'll take queen. 

David: The, the, the pink. The pink lady.  

Jessica: The pink lady. Yeah, exactly. Um, well, it's, it's a relevant question for apple pie because that's the fruit pie that most people bake, you know, for Thanksgiving. But really a relevant question for all fruit pies, because I have certainly made pies. 

They look great, they're fully baked, et cetera, et cetera. You take them outta the oven, you cut them into it, and it's like soup between, between two layers of crust. Such a bummer. Such a bummer. Yeah, huge bummer. And I think, you know, one of the tricky things, of course is that like fruit is, you know, it's an agricultural product, it's variable, you know, fruit's not always gonna have the same amount of moisture from season to season, from variety to variety. 

So like it is, you know, there's always a little bit of guesswork. But I will say a few things. We have a spectacular pie thickening guide. Chart, really a pie thickener chart on the website that we'll put in the show notes and it breaks it down by types of fruit because of course, fruits that have more pectin are going to set more readily than fruits that don't. 

Um, and then, you know, depending on what thickener you want to use, it sort of explains the pros and cons of like tapioca starch versus corn starch versus all purpose flour versus instant clear gel. And I use that chart. I have found it gets you very close to where you wanna be in terms of like getting the right amount of thickener, right? Kind of thickener for the type of fruit that you're using.  

David: And apples have a fair amount of pectin.  

Jessica: They have a fair amount of pectin, so it's not gonna be as soupy as say, a blueberry pie or a strawberry pie 'cause those have very little pectins. So those are gonna need more of whatever thickener you choose. 

And there are pros and cons to using all of those thickeners that I described. Um, some like I find cornstarch gives you like a particularly, what's the word I want to use here? It's a stronger set and it can be like a little, almost gummier. Mm-hmm. I was gonna say ooze, but that just now I've ruined it for everyone. 

Everyone's like, ah. Um, but you know, it gives you that sort of corn starchy, thickened texture. Mm-hmm. Um, so they all have their pros and cons, but the thickener chart lays all of that out and I think that's a great place, a great resource to use. I also think we talked about the importance of fully baking your pie. 

David: Yes,  

Jessica: But then you've gotta really let your pie fully cool.  

David: Well that is a great tip.  

Jessica: It is a great tip. And fully baking it, as I said, is going to like activate the, the setting power of whatever thickener you've used. Like it has to come to like a nice, like a hot enough temperature. And that temperature is usually indicated by that, you know, piping, hot bubbling that gives the thickener, you know, the temperature it needs to fully activate uh, and realize it's full thickening potential, but then when it comes outta the oven, like you've gotta wait hours, hours and hours and hours. Hours.  

David: And I would even say you could bake your pie the day ahead and it would be totally fine, I think.  

Jessica: I think better that than try and bake it in the afternoon, serve it for dinner that night.  

David: Oh, absolutely. Not the afternoon. You gotta either, you either have to bake it the day ahead or first thing in the morning.  

Jessica: Yep. And I often, if I get everything, you know, set up, ready to go so that you know, all I have to do is prepare my fruit and drop it in the crust. 

Like early morning is an option. Pie is not gonna suffer if you bake it in the evening and serve it the next evening.   

David: No, it's gonna be fine. And it's gonna be better.  

Jessica: It's gonna be better and it will have a chance to like really solidify and then you'll get those nice clean slices. And you know, tip from our test kitchen director Sarah Jampel, she suggests that the best thing to cut your pie with is actually a serrated bread knife because you can sort of saw through the crust versus using a straight edge blade where you have to exert a fair amount of downward pressure. Mm-hmm. And then you can kind of crumble the crust and kind of squish the filling because what you want, what we all want is like, I mean, forget the first slice. Those are always like so hard to get out. But what we all want is to cut that slice, get our pie server in there, and like pull up a slice that like holds its shape. That's the goal, and I think the things that I mentioned will help you obtain that goal.  

David: So check the pie fruit thickener chart. Do a really strong bake, get that crust golden, golden, golden brown, and let it rest for a few hours. At least 12 hours, I'd say at least, yeah, eight hours. At least eight. I'd say eight. Eight hours at least.  

Jessica: Yeah,  

David: A full working day.  

Jessica: A full working day, yeah. But I hope that helps you make the apple pie of your dreams. Thanks caller. 

David: Every episode we'd like to check in with Jessica to see what wildly surprising and full throated ideas are in her head, a segment we lovingly call Jess-opinions. Jessica, what is your Thanksgiving pie Jess-opinion? 

Jessica: This one's gonna make you mad. I know we spent an entire episode talking about pie, and honestly, I'm going to make pies for Thanksgiving because I'm an American and that's what we do. 

Okay? Yeah, because pressure, right? I'm gonna make pies, but if I had my druthers, I would not make any pies. I would make cookies instead because I think cookies are a superior Thanksgiving dessert. And I'm gonna tell you why.   

David: What? Come on. Superior? 

Jessica: Better than pies. I think better than pies. Imagine if you will. Forecast yourself a few weeks in the future, and you have just eaten like the turkey, the stuffing, the mashed potatoes, the casserole, et cetera, et cetera, and you feel like you're borderline coma state. Right? And then, and then out come all these pies, like rich butter crusted pies, and you're like, oh, I just want a sliver. Right? I'm always like, I just want a sliver of all of them.  

David: Oh, I, I couldn't possibly. 

Jessica: But if somebody brought out a cookie platter, if somebody brought out a cookie platter, you know, with like a lots of little cookies on it, variety of cookies, you'd be like, oh, I'll just have myself a little cookie. 

I don't know, I feel like there's more space in a full stomach for just a little cookie.  

David: Okay, I'm on the record as loving a cookie platter, and I think you've laid out a very logical argument, Jessica, but there's a huge flaw here, which is that you're focusing on the evening of Thanksgiving and you are completely ignoring the next morning. 

Oh, that's true. That's true. So what do you eat the next morning if there's no pie? That's true. What do you eat for breakfast the next day?  

Jessica: Gravy. You're like, ah, like I don't have to do anything for pie. I'm gonna eat leftovers. And you drink the, your coffee and you have your slice of chilled pumpkin pie. 

David: Mm-hmm. I mean that, no cookie's gonna give you that. Okay. I'll, so, I don't know. Again, again, with the coffee pumpkin connection, it's, it's really where it is this year. I'm really pushing my agenda.  

Jessica: But I do think a cookie plate is a very nice, also easier to prepare, less fraught. Like people know how to make cookies. 

You have your cookie plate and then you're getting a headstart on Christmas. It's just an idea. It's just an idea I'm putting out. I don't know if it's gonna take over in mainstream America, I feel like I'm fighting some significant headwinds.  

David: I think it's a great, I think it's a lovely idea to add a cookie option. So if people, for people who have saved room for pie, they eat their pie. And for people who are just want a little, a little something, it's a little nibble. Yeah.  

Jessica: Yeah.  

David: They eat a cookie and then there's still pie leftover for breakfast. So I think you're onto something. I think it just needs a little bit tweaking. We're, we're gonna workshop this. We're gonna workshop this by next year, we're gonna have it, uh, all sorted out. So speaking of that, what is the Thanksgiving pie you will be baking this Thanksgiving? 

Jessica: I love an apple pie, but I love making tarte tatin, which is something I learned many, many, many, many, many years ago. 

And I think to me it's like apple pie 2.0 because the apples just like get so deeply caramelized and take on so much flavor. It's also just one crust instead of two. And I just think it's beautiful and I serve that with whipped creme fraiche. And, um, you know, it is a little controversial. People are like, where's the real apple pie? 

But you know what? My house, my rules, tarte tatin and this year I shared that recipe for tarte tatin with our test kitchen team. And so it is now on the website. So if anyone else wants to join me in this endeavor, the recipe, we'll put it in the show notes. What about you? 

David: So I'm really hot on the idea of a cranberry pie for Thanksgiving. 

We do have a great cranberry pie on the site. It's a cranberry chiffon pie that went up a few years ago. It's a curd-based pie, so it's not whole cranberries. It's very smooth, very delicious. I've made it gluten-free for my sister a few times with a gluten-free ginger snap crust, and it's, it gives me the cranberry hit that I want without the jiggle. 

Jessica: Yeah. I love a chiffon pie and I actually think a chiffon pie is a nice choice for Thanksgiving because it does have that lightness. You know, the chiffon pies have the egg whites beaten into it. So it's got that nice, almost like sort of foamy, yeah, in a good way. A little moussey. Yeah, a little moussey. 

Exactly. I could talk about pie for a hundred more hours, but you know, we might, listeners might start to drop off at a certain point, so we gotta call it for this week as ever. Thank you for tuning in and joining us here on Things Bakers Know. We're gonna be back next week, and next week is an all Q&A episode, so we're answering all of your holiday baking questions. 

We have lots of guest experts.  

David: I'm excited about that episode because you and I are kind of off the hook. Like we're bringing in the real experts for that one. Remember to like and subscribe on Apple Podcast, YouTube, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Jessica: Leave a review while you're there or share this episode with a friend. Maybe share it with a person you're, you know, gonna share the Thanksgiving meal making load with. 

David: Share this with the person you're assigning the pies to.  

Jessica: Yeah. Share. Yeah, share this. Get it right. Yeah, exactly. Share this with the brother-in-laws of the world. 

David: Right. Anyway, we will see you back here next week. In the meantime, don't forget, follow the recipe and Thanksgiving will be fine.  

Jessica: Take a deep breath. Follow the recipe. 

David: Things Bakers Know is hosted and executive produced by me, David Tamarkin,  

Jessica: And me, Jessica Battilana  

David: Rossi Anastopoulo is our senior producer. Chad Chenail is our producer and Marcus Bagala is our engineer. Original music by Megan and Marcus Bagala.  

Jessica: This episode featured cookbook author Stacey Mei Yan Fong. You can learn more about her work and her cookbook at 50pies50states.com  

David: Things Bakers Know is a King Arthur Baking Company podcast.