On Pies

I love pies. Stick anything fitting into a pie crust and I will definitely eat it. Doesn’t matter what the filling is either. Sweet or savory, I love it. There’s something very comforting about some nice pastry with a tasty filling, especially when it’s warm and fresh from the oven. There’s so much you can do with a pie. But although they seem simple enough at a glance, turns out that a lot of work goes into making a pie.

I just wish making a pie wasn’t such a pain. Well, it’s not a pain, but it’s also not completely simple. Also depends on what you have on hand. Most pies ought to be blind-baked first (i.e. cook the pastry in the pie tin before adding the filling), or they risk having a soggy bottom. If it’s something meaty, then you need to make sure that the insides are cooked. When it comes to a pie, it can be a balancing act between making sure the pastry is cooked and making sure the filling is properly cooked too.

Now, I could just go to a shop and buy a pie of some sort. But buying pies tends to be even more expensive. Well, meat pies are. Fruit pies tend to be somewhat reasonable, but they have a better shelf life. Then again, they’re also not as fresh. And filled with sugar.

Where I live though, I can go to a bakery and buy things that are basically pies. One of my favourites is a cheese pie, in soft puff pastry and a traditional cheese filling. There’s a variant of this that uses a sweet cheese like anari or ricotta, that also tastes heavenly. A sausage pie, a sausage baked inside some puff pastry, is always a popular treat at a bakery. Technically, some of these are pasties and pastries, not proper pies, but they have the same criteria. They are all pastries with some sort of filling. Well most of them. A Tahini Pie doesn’t really count because the filling is mostly on the outside.

However, buying a more traditional (or perhaps, more British) pie is quite expensive. You can get frozen pies in the freezer section of most stores, and they’re rarely discounted and are quite expensive. These frozen pies also take a long, long time to cook. The frozen chicken and mushroom pie I had the other day required 45 minutes of cooking time in the oven. Really, in that time, I might as well have bought some ready-made pastry and baked a pie myself.

Speaking of buying ready-made pastry, it really does speed up the production time. Making a pastry for your pie can be tedious – even just a simple short crust pastry can go wrong if you add to much liquid. Ready-made stuff is still somewhat expensive but you can generally get a nice, big pie out of them. Or lots of little ones.

As a side note, I also like pi. Symbolized with the Greek letter π, pi is an irrational number that goes on forever. But pi isn’t edible the same way pie is.

I want pie now. I’ve gone and made myself hungry.