For the Love of Pie: Sweet and Savory Recipes

Introduction

Pie makes everybody happy

The Impossible Knife of Memory -Laurie Halse Anderson,

Why Pie?

It’s the essence of hand-made. It’s not like cake, there’s no mix for it. Once you learn the basics, you’re there. Anything locally available to you is potentially pie. Pie is not a trend, but a constant. Our pie is the best of the best because of our philosophy of learning how to do it right, and using the purest, most wholesome ingredients available.

Why Now?

You might have read that pie is trending. While it’s true that people on the streets are talking about, and seeking out pie, we believe that pie is too essential to trend. We think America has simply experienced an awakening, and begun to recognize this idea. In exactly the same way Americans have been called to pull out the knitting needles, the gardening gloves, and the beer-brewing equipment, they’ve been converted to embracing the basics. More and more people are preparing and eating whole food, hand-made with a minimum of pomp and fuss. Pie is the quintessential slow food because it’s always better made in small batches and by hand.

Why Us?

We’d like to introduce ourselves: Our names are Cheryl Perry and Felipa Lopez, and we dedicate our lives to pie in all its glorious forms.

If you’re wondering, Why pie? Why now? let us fill you in on an open secret: It’s always been pie.

Pie is an elemental food.

Truth. End of story. You cannot argue the point.

Both the crust and the filling of a good pie denote the very essence of the word handmade. Pie is filling, pie is nourishing, pie is comforting, and pie is an adventure. It’s a dish that evokes home and hearth. People’s reaction to pie is visceral; pie makes people feel good. Pie makes people feel loved. That is why we at Pie Corps devote ourselves entirely to sustaining, developing, upgrading, and promoting pie and pie alone.

Here at Pie Corps, we’re on a mission: To offer the finest quality, handmade, soul satisfying, savory, and sweet pie to the people of Brooklyn and beyond. More than that, we want to teach people to make it for themselves, and for their loved ones. We’re changing people’s thinking when it comes to pie. We’re flying the flag of insist on the best. We are pie-oneers, perfecting ways to make life tastier, one bite at a time. We at Pie Corps are part of a large group of people, banded together for one common goal, and that goal is the love of pie. Why?

Because everyone loves pie.

We’d invite you to join The Corps, but you’re already one of us. Welcome home.

Why Pie Is Our Mission?

We want to share. We want you to know what we know. We want to remove all fear around pie-making. We’ve heard it time and again from our customers and from the students in our in-house pie-making classes, I don’t make homemade piecrusts. There are so many ways it can go wrong. We agree. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can mess it up. Don’t be afraid of the truth. Making a perfect crust is a whole lot of science, with a little dash of art. There’s a right way to do it and a wrong way.

Why do we do it our way? Because it’s the best way. We want to share what we’ve learned through decades of trial and error with everyone who loves pie. Which, as you know, we believe is everyone.

For the Love of Pie

Our partnership fell into place as naturally as rain. When we met, we were drawn to each other because we both love food. We mean love it. We both love cooking and beautiful ingredients, and basically knew instantly that we wanted to have a food business together. We opened Pie Corps with the intention of exciting, engaging, and enticing the palates of pie enthusiasts to the next level by introducing them to the concept of sustainability, and the joy of eating fresh, whole, seasonal foods.

A Little about Cheryl

We both hail from strong food families. I started out early, cooking for my Russian-Jewish family. My grandmother only cooked traditional Eastern European food, but she did it the best way, and made everything with quality and love each time. That singularity of vision pushed me to branch out on a journey to explore all types of cuisine and investigate the techniques that I didn’t learn at my grandmother’s elbow.

For me, perfecting pies under the roof of a business I owned was a quest: I owned the contemporary American restaurant Dish for six years, and was an instructor at the Natural Gourmet Institute of Health and Culinary Arts for about fifteen years, along with maintaining a consulting practice dedicated to advising food-related start-up businesses for over five years, but that was not enough.

Even with over 20 years of professional experience under my belt, I knew I wouldn’t feel like I was a real chef until I mastered pie. The hallmark of a truly great chef is pastry, and the pinnacle is pie. I’ve been an avid pie maker for most of my career, but I never felt I had it in my bones and muscles until I spent one entire glorious summer, from May to September, at my country house upstate making a pie a day for anyone who would eat it. I can now say, without reservation, that I know the best way to make pies, and I love doing it that way every time.

A Little about Felipa

Felipa comes from a family of Cubans and Puerto Ricans boasting many great cooks, including her grandmother, who on the day she died at age 102, cooked herself a pork chop and sat down with a cup of café con leche and ate before taking herself to the hospital, where she died with a belly full of her own home cooking.

Her dad, a professional chef, took her to markets when she was a girl, and taught her how to choose the best foods, herbs, and spices at the peak times. He also taught her how to stock a kitchen. She always has the ingredients to make any ethnic dish I or our friends ask for. Want Pad Thai? Fine! She has the lemongrass and fish sauce. Chicken tikka masala? No problem. She has cumin and ghee.

Her father would ask her what cake she wanted for her birthday, and her response was always the same: lemon meringue pie. She’d sit on a kitchen stool and watch him use a fork to hand-whip egg whites into a tall, creamy topping. She learned to make empanadas, and fill them with what was at hand, cooked with a Cuban influence.

‘It’s like Thanksgiving in a pie,’ Gayle said after tasting this flaky, 100 percent Vermont butter-crusted package of handmade goodness filled with roasted turkey, sweet potatoes and fresh rosemary.

—Oprah Magazine

Pie is multicultural. Everybody understands it as a meal, and everyone understands it as a snack.

So now she naturally stuffs hand pies and pielettes with carnitas, picadillo, and bacalao, while I tend to lean on foods from my childhood and can make a brisket pie, or the slab pie version of a blintz without thinking. Together, we make pies hailing from all ethnic backgrounds: We especially love French and Indian influences.

In a way, Felipa’s path to pie-making mirrored mine: She devoted time to teaching herself to make fruit pies over the course of a long vacation. She already knew savory cooking from the dishes her dad and grandmother taught her. She wanted the skill to put all of the delicious, in-season fruit grown locally into the perfect pie.

In addition to her passion for all things culinary, Felipa practices as a New York City- and Brooklyn-based acupuncturist. After establishing her practice in 2006, it dawned on her that she wanted to incorporate a food as medicine emphasis into her healing arts. This began a foray into the world of lacto-fermentation and traditional nutrition. She’s discovered a multitude of new ideas around eating, creating balance around what we eat and drink, and how we nourish our bodies. Making pie for Pie Corps combines many of her culinary interests, including the subtlety of balancing dynamic flavor with wholesome, real local foods that feed not only the body, but the spirit as well.

The Pie Corps Shop in Brooklyn

Pie Corps is a small pie company with a big reach. We began humbly, perfecting our pies using country house guests as testers, and then peddling our pastries at an upstate farmers market. Before we knew it, we couldn’t keep up with the demand. Our devoted fans confirmed what we already knew to be true: People want pie.

Next, we expanded to markets local to New York City, such as The Hester Street Fair and the New Amsterdam Market. Fizzing with nerves about opening a new business in a soft economy, but confident in the quality of our mission and our wares, we opened our hearts on Lucky Ant, a crowd-funding site not unlike Kickstarter, and laid bare our dream. In the blink of an eye, supporters pitched in enough for our first industrial oven. Before long our pies had earned us enough to set up a brick-and-mortar shop. We chose Brooklyn. We knew in our souls that it was the place. We planned to be Pie-oneers, and to grow with the neighborhood.

Our goal for opening the shop in Greenpoint was to create a home base in our community so that we could serve, connect, and teach. We like to keep things local, and our tribe is in Brooklyn. The way we embrace our community is the way we cook and serve food. On a more primal level, it’s the way we cook and eat. We’re modern women who believe the old ways are the best ways when it comes to food, friends, and family. For us, excellence and purity surpass any passing trend.

From the time we open our doors in the morning at 8 a.m. to serve Egg and Mushroom Hand Pies and Salmon, Dill, and Goat Cheese Quiche alongside steaming Red Eyes and Lattes, to the time we serve our last heaving slabs of Fresh Seafood Pie and delicate Honey Lavender Tarts and shut the doors at 8 p.m., our shop hums with convivial conversation and passion for pie. Our singular goal paid off: Not only do we have a booming business at our café, but we supply pies to the grocery store, Union Market, restaurants such as Café Lalo and Brother Jimmy’s BBQ, the grab-and-go vendors at LaGuardia airport, and the major supermarket chain Whole Foods.

In our popular, and often sold-out pie-making classes, we not only teach eager learners how to make a perfect crust every time, we also share our philosophy surrounding pie. It is as simple and wholesome as the pies we make: Whenever possible, use the very best locally grown, organic, seasonal ingredients. We use organic ingredients as often as we can, and only source from non-local vendors when we’ve exhausted all other options. We believe you should prepare dishes that delight and excite the senses, and avoid the seduction to overcomplicate what you make. First and foremost, allow the natural flavors of excellent food to shine. This is how we cook at home, this is how we cook for our loyal Greenpoint customers and our far-flung devotees, and this is how we cook for the green markets and respected supermarket chains that we supply.

We enjoy food that comforts, pleases, and sustains us. That’s exactly what we provide for our guests, friends, and patrons. That goodness is what you’ll smell when you throw open the door at our cozy Driggs Avenue storefront, and what you’ll taste when you sit down to bite into your slice of pie, accompanied by a strong, rich mug of coffee. We never settle for less, and you shouldn’t have to, either.

We’re chefs who care deeply about weaning people off of sub-par, processed fast food and onto what’s fresh, delicious, and most of all, real. We want to teach everyone, from the novice home cook, to the accomplished foodie, how to make a solid, old-world, delectable pie that hits the mark every time.

How Will You Find Success?

As with musicians, you have to learn the scales before you improvise. It’s serious. Eventually you can wing it, but you have to know the rules before you break them. Baking is a whole lot of science, with a little bit of art.

My grandmother made it the best. Why? She made it every day and she knew the way that was the best. You have to experience it over and over. After you do it by hand 20 times, THEN you can use the food processor. There is knowledge behind the feel when an experienced baker reaches into the mixture. We can teach anyone to do it right, with clear guidelines and the suggestion to take baby steps.

The Basics: Before You Get Started

Here are tips and tricks about how to use this book. We suggest reading through it all before starting for a clear overview of how to make the best pies, the best way.

A Caveat about Oven Temperature

All of the temperatures we’ve advised for the recipes in this book pre-suppose the use of metal pie plates. If you’re using a ceramic, glass, or Pyrex pie plate, raise the temperature by 25 degrees F. In many cases, we suggest turning the baking trays on which the pie plates rest halfway through the cooking time for even baking. As with all recipes, the temperatures and cooking times are approximate. Get to know your pans and your oven by making the same dish again and again. Look for visual cues such as gravy bubbling through vents, edges of custard pies beginning to set, bold aromas, and crusts turning golden brown in order to help you decide when the baking time is complete.

This is the way that’s the best. If you want to do it other ways, you can, but this is the best.

—Cheryl’s bubby, Minnie Weiner

Ingredients

Our friend and fellow chef, Anton Nocito, artisanal soda-syrup maker, claims as his slogan: Materia Prima. In short, it means Simply the Best when it comes to ingredients. We love this saying too, and strive to live by it in our culinary lives.

Aristotle said, The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and that’s what we work toward at Pie Corps. But we use really great parts as building blocks.

Consider a Caprese salad, or Insalata Caprese. It’s nothing more than slices of tomato and mozzarella cheese, layered with fresh basil leaves, drizzled with olive oil, and maybe sprinkled with salt and pepper. It’s so basic, it’s hardly cooking. But, when the tomatoes are garden-fresh, the cheese is fragrant and artisanal, the basil leaves have just been plucked, the olive oil is top-quality, the salt is sea salt from the Mediterranean, and the pepper is freshly ground, this dish reaches sublime heights.

Here’s our advice about some common ingredients you’ll find in the recipes in this book. Boiled down, it’s this: Start with the best, and