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Tips for pie makers

Courtest Provincetown Commons

Imagine yourself sitting down to dessert at the end of a holiday feast. What are you looking for in a pie? This is the question a panel of judges in Provincetown asks themselves each year at an event at the Provincetown Commons called Pie Fest. This year I stopped by to listen in on a rambunctious judging session to get some fresh ideas and baking tips in the lead up to the holidays.

"This is a black plum pie. She looks fantastic. This is a heavy plate ya’ll. Lift up number ten. When you get a chance; she a heavy girl."

That’s Delta Miles, Provincetown performer and pie connoisseur. The weight of this particular pie was all in its crust.

"She’s a thick girl, I’ll give her four c’s on the thick scale," Delta added.

"Is that one of the categories," I asked.

"No, that’s one of my categories. Thick!"

The thing about a nice thick crust all the judges agreed is that it can stand up to a good long baking time. And especially with a fruit pie, you want this. Otherwise, the fruit can stay kind of underdone and you want it to bubble away for so long that it’s almost jammy. Judge Claire Adams who’s been a blue-ribbon winner in the past thought the plum pie did this beautifully—

One judge said it reminded them of canned peaches, which they loved — but chef Kelly Fields took issue with the spices.

"It’s so aggressively warm-spiced that you can’t taste the plum."

I asked Kelly they were picking up for spices.

"All the warm spices. It’s like clovey, nutmeg…"

Maybe some cinnamon and ginger too, people were guessing and in moderation the judges agreed, these spices can really pull a pie together. But too often, cooks overdo it.

"Nutmeg’s like the rug in the Big Lebowski, it’s just supposed to bring it all together. You’re not supposed to have this strong flavor of nutmeg in most things," Kelly said.

The same goes for sugar. Despite having excellent thick crusts and well-cooked fruit, several of the fruit pies served were so sweet that some of the judges, Miles included, found it hard to eat more than a few bites.

"When I think of a really good pie, I think of a pie that I sneak into the fridge with a fork to eat without taking a slice out, like sneakily," Delta said.

It’s so sweet that it’s just too much of a commitment as Miles put it. It also matters how much you mix the pie dough while you’re making the crust — the judges talked a lot about this, because with pie crust it’s the opposite of something bread dough, where you want to knead and mix extensively. Instead, you’re trying to actively avoid developing stretchy gluten strands and keep the dough soft and flakey, so you don’t hear a critique like this.

With fruit pies there’s so much to remember: thick flakey crust, sweet but not too sweet jammy filling, some spice but not too much — which is why sometimes it pays to just go rogue and try something totally weird and different — for instance carrot cake custard pie with walnuts. Here’s Chef Fields again:

"I’m not comparing it to carrot cake because I’m not particularly a carrot cake person, but I really like that pie."

It was weirdly wet and yet somehow it worked. A lot of people really liked it — I think because like all truly excellent pies, it combined crunchy crust and soft filling with complementary flavors — which as it turns out, in this particular contest, was the winning combination:

Delta explains here, "This is the peanut butter banana cream pie — that for me is all the things I love. Mmm…I do like the balance of the thick banana pudding and the peanut butter coming through very clearly and then you have the crunchy bottom..peanut butter cookie! Oh, that’s good."

The Provincetown Independent covered Pie Fest here.

Elspeth Hay is a writer and the creator and host of the Local Food Report, a weekly feature that has aired on CAI since 2008. Deeply immersed in her own local-food system, she writes and reports for print, radio, and online media with a focus on food, the environment, and the people, places, and ideas that feed us.