Pie can be a savoury dish or a sweet treat made of a filling and pastry. The pastry, called pie crust, can sit underneath, on top, or even wrap the whole filling. Traditionally, pie pastry was made from simple ingredients: flour, salt, water and fat.
Originally pies used lard (animal fat). Few people use it today, partly because it's hard to find and probably also for health reasons, so butter and shortening are used instead, or mixed in with the fat, since lard does have the advantage of making pastry crisp and crumbly.
Pie in Western Cuisine
Pie is well known in Western food, especially sweet pie. Its hallmark is the pastry that holds or encases the food, adding depth and texture to the dish. There are several kinds of pastry, such as savoury and sweet pastry. Pie is an important part of French cuisine: fine restaurants serve dishes using pastry, such as pâté en terrine (pâté in French means pie), or use it as a playful garnish on the plate. In American cuisine, pie is more of an everyday comfort food or a homemaker's staple, such as apple pie, cherry pie and pecan pie.
Types of Pie
- Baked pie: a pie that is eaten warm.
- Open-top pie: such as quiche and pumpkin pie. Usually the pastry base is partly baked first before the filling goes in, so the pastry stays crisp. This method is called blind baking.
- Closed (double-crust) pie: known as a two-layer pie crust. The pastry and filling bake together, and the filling is rather drier than in an open pie, such as apple pie, or it is a pre-cooked filling such as chicken pie or coconut pie. The top crust must also be pierced so steam can escape, keeping the filling dry and the pastry from going soggy.
- Chilled (unbaked) pie: as the name suggests, eaten cold. The base and filling are prepared separately and assembled later, such as fruit pies, lemon meringue pie, or mousse and custard pies. Later chilled pies often use crushed biscuits or cookies instead of pastry to simplify things, such as blueberry pie and banoffee pie.
How to Make Crisp Pie Pastry
A crisp crust depends on temperature and technique. In most pastry-making, the first step is rubbing the dry ingredients (flour, salt, sugar) with cold butter by hand until crumbly, like coarse breadcrumbs. This disperses the butter throughout, coated in flour. The key here is that the butter must be cold so it coats the flour in small pieces (except for sweet pastry, pâte sucrée, where the butter is first creamed with the sugar). Then add the liquid, which must also be cold, because cold reduces gluten formation in the flour and keeps the butter from melting.
Baking Pie
Bake pie at about 180–200°C; any lower and the pastry will be soggy. Cooked pastry is golden and, once cool, crisp and crumbly when broken. When done, let it rest on a rack until completely cool before removing from the tin. And that's how you get a delicious pie!
