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.

Only one of us had attempted it. And every time I saw Lamb, the teacher would gently remind this pupil that she had yet to tackle her fear of flour.

Like many other people who grew up in a non-baking household, I never learned how to make pastry. Or bread. Or pasta. Gluten, truth be told, terrifies me.

Sperry understands this.

"Baking is very fickle. If something isn't right there isn't anything you can do about it. It's very scientific."

Most North American pies use all-purpose flour because it has a higher gluten content (10 to 12 per cent protein), which holds up the fat when it melts and creates the flaky layers we so adore. Cake and pastry flour (8 to 10 per cent protein) is often added to lower gluten content. But work the pastry too much, and the dreaded gluten develops anyway, creating a tough dough. The fat also changes the outcome: You can't beat butter for flavour, but it's harder to work with.

So $22 later, I take the picture-perfect pie home. Sperry uses a mix of cake and pastry flour, all-purpose flour, sugar and salt, and sticks with Crisco vegetable shortening for the fat. Each pie is rolled out by hand, which avoids the factory look. But Sperry has been baking since she was 4, so she can't help herself. The crust, for example, is perfectly fluted.

Lamb likes it.

"This is very good, Kim," he says. "The pastry is very flaky. It definitely tastes like a homemade apple pie, which is key."

When he was growing up in Ottawa, in a household with seven kids, his mother made pie four or five times a week.

"You didn't buy desserts in those days," says Lamb, who is 62.

In early August, when the temperature was cool, he made 19 pies in eight days. A couple of summers ago, he made 50 in two months.

The pies are given away to neighbours, particularly to newcomers and families of newborns. Dinner guests are always forewarned pie is coming, a gentle nudge to let them know they need to save room.

"It is a genuine source of joy for me to make and serve a pie, to see the happy faces," Lamb says.

I fess up to the fake after I see his contented smile. He takes it well.

"You totally fooled me," he says. "I was fooled by somebody who makes a good pie."

Later, he calls me. He didn't want to be too critical of his pupil, but now that he knows it was a professional job, he wants me to know he thinks the crust was too tough where it joins together.

My other pie expert, David Keogh, is so enamoured of pastry and filling that he requests birthday pies, not cakes. On one trip up to his cottage in Southampton this summer, he stopped in no fewer than eight towns to try the pie. This is what he refers to as "outside" pie, given that his wife, Moira McCallum, makes a pretty mean pie at home, known as "inside" pie.

"A lot of that pie was crap," says Keogh, who has worked in the restaurant business for 30 years. "There's a lot of bad pie out there."

I tricked him with the Flaky Tart pie, too. "This is like a classic Canadian pie," he says.

When I tell him it was an "outside" pie, he says he never suspected.

"Perhaps I was infatuated with the pie itself," he says. "Perhaps I saw through nothing because I just saw the pie sitting on the counter."

Like Sperry, Keogh is in favour of farming out pie if the host is stressed or has the fear of flour.

"Making a pie for people on the outside is hard. People who know how to do it, don't think about it."

Sperry says it takes practice, and there are a lot of factors that are beyond the baker's control.

"With pastry you have to have patience," she says. "I think it's a time factor. You can't rush pastry."