We all love our pies, sweet or savoury, no matter. We all have our favourite pie, but how much do we know about the history of pies?

Let us enlighten you… (with the help of “What’s Cooking America”)

The first pies, called “coffins” or “coffyns” were savory meat pies with the crusts or pastry being tall, straight-sided with sealed-on floors and lids. Open-crust pastry (not tops or lids) were known as “traps.” These pies held assorted meats and sauce components and were baked more like a modern casserole with no pan (the crust itself was the pan, its pastry tough and inedible). The purpose of a pastry shell was mainly to serve as a storage container and serving vessel, and these are often too hard to actually eat. A small pie was known as a tartlet and a tart was a large, shallow open pie (this is still the definition in England). Since pastry was a staple ingredient in medieval menus, pastry making was taken for granted by the majority of early cookbooks, and recipes are not usually included. It wasn’t until the 16th century that cookbooks with pastry ingredients began appearing. Historian believe this was because cookbooks started appearing for the general household and not just for professional cooks.

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Create delicious crumbles
by Terry Farris

Spice up your crumbles with nuts, crushed biscuits and rich brown sugars!

If you were asked to make a list of your favourite autumn and winter puddings, crumble would surely come near the top. Maybe it?s the contrast between the crunchy top and the tart fruit underneath; perhaps it?s because it?s so luscious served piping hot with cold cream poured over, or maybe it?s the anticipation of those midnight raids for spoonfuls of chilled leftovers straight from the fridge. Continue reading →

by Beth Kracklauer
This article was first published in Saveur in Issue #115

The annual return of mincemeat desserts is an occasion worth celebratingThanksgiving is a pie lover’s holiday. At my house, all the usual suspects are in attendance: pecan, pumpkin, and apple à la mode.

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Pastie or Pasty

These are basically individual pies filled with meats and vegetables that are cooked together. The identifying feature of the Cornish pasty is really the pastry and it’s crimping.

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Found on “The Kitchn” site – a very basic introduction to the anatomy of a pie crust.

At its most basic, pie crust is nothing more than flour, fat, and liquid. But if that’s all it is, why is pie crust so notoriously difficult to make by hand? Let’s take a look:

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In the home kitchen, there are two kinds of people: cooks and bakers. For cooks, recipes are mere suggestions, flexible in their ingredients and proportions. For bakers, on the other hand, recipes are gospel truth, precise in their measurements and techniques.

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Fear of flour and lack of experience prompt the Star ‘s food editor to buy into a pie scheme that fooled her teacher
Kim Honey, Food Editor
 

The apple pie was picture-perfect. It had an impressive dome, an evenly browned crust and a sprinkling of coarse sugar over the top.

Being a neophyte baker, there was no way I could have made it myself. But at The Flaky Tart on Mount Pleasant Ave., just south of Eglinton, owner Madelaine Sperry was more than happy to take my pie plate and my order.

“You tell me how you want it to look and I’ll do it,” the affable baker says. “It doesn’t bother me.”

I ask for apple and direct her to make it look amateurish. I am going to present it to my neighbour Ed Lamb, a pie maker extraordinaire who had, about six months earlier, taught me and six other women on my street how to make apple pie.

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by Diane Kochilas  

This article was first published in Saveur in Issue #24

The first time I saw a home cook ”open” phyllo the papery pastry dough essential to such classic Greek dishes as baklava and spanakópitta (spinach pie), I was visiting a monastery in Metsovo, a scenic mountain village in the Ípiros region of northwestern Greece. Ípiros is pítta country? Not pita, the ubiquitous Middle Eastern flat bread, but pítta, which is the word Greeks use to refer to a whole inventory of savory pies, whose ingredients are tucked between buttered or oiled layers of crisp phyllo. Continue reading →

Analysis of accidents in the bakery and flour confectionery industry has highlighted the following main types of risk and the preventative measures that may be taken to reduce them. They are by no means exhaustive and will vary depending on your own particular business. This is really just a starting point or guide. Continue reading →