Pie Overlord Erin Jeanne McDowell joins host Kristen Miglore to discuss how to *not* have butter melt all over the floor of your oven, how to tote even your tallest pies safely, and, of course, her new cookbook 'The Book on Pie.'
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Kristen Miglore (voiceover): Hi. I'm Kristen Miglore, lifelong genius hunter. For almost a decade, I've been unearthing the recipes that have changed the way we cook. On The Genius Recipe Tapes, we’re sharing the behind-the-scenes moments from talking with the geniuses themselves that we couldn't quite squeeze into the column or video: the extra-genius tricks, the off-road riffs, and the personal stories that actually have nothing to do with the recipe that week.
My guest this week is cookbook author, food stylist and all around pie queen Erin Jeanne McDowell. We talk about the making of her new book, The Book on Pie, and she answers your most burning questions. like how to transport even your tallest pie safely, and how not to have butter melt all over the floor of your oven ever again.
Kristen: Hi, Erin.
Erin: Hi, Kristin. Thanks so much for having me.
Kristen: So good to see your face. Thank you for being here. Let's talk about The Book on Pie.
Erin: Yes. Let's!
Kristen: The theme pie for you. Why was it a book on pie and not on cookies or cakes or ice creams?
Erin: So when I wrote my first book, I actually submitted a pie proposal. When I was trying to write my first book, I submitted a proposal for a book that was all about pie. And then I submitted a second proposal, which was a more general baking book that explained the science behind baking, which I was very excited about as well. And that is what my first book became, The Fearless Baker. But it should say something that when I had the opportunity to even submit a proposal that the first thing on my mind was pie. And it's one of the reasons I bring it up now because I would have done it back then. But I'm very, very glad, for so many reasons, that it is my second book. Because you learn a lot in the book writing process. And I love my first book, it's amazing. But The Book on Pie is so much better for the experience I gained while writing the first book. And it all starts with loving to eat pie. That's where this infatuation comes from. I have very fond memories of specific pies, spinning in diner cases when I was a kid, and being like “What's that?!” And it had all this whipped cream, and then when you would order a slice, they would put more whipped cream on it or they would put ice cream on. I was like, “What is this thing? I want this all the time! It's amazing.” And both my parents really like pie, my grandmother really likes pie. It was something that when we would see a place had pie, people in my family were stoked and ordering it and wanted that thing.
So I have a lot of memories with pie. But the most important memory comes when I was about 14 years old, and my grandma and I made a pie together for her to take to church. It was an apple pie, but she wanted to make it with an olive oil crust because she had seen it in a magazine. So we made this crust together, and I never made a pie before, I mean, aside from maybe helping my mom once or twice, here and there, possibly. But it didn't seem odd to me at all, I didn't know much about baking at that point. And when we ate it, I thought it was delicious. I also loved being the person who was walking into this church function carrying the pie because everybody was like, “What's that? What's that? What's that?” And a lot of bakers say that their favorite part about making something is being able to share it with people. And right away I was hooked. I was like “This is what baking is? Oh my gosh, I want to do this all the time!” I want to give things to people, make stuff for people. And then my grandma tasted the pie, and she was not impressed. She was very disappointed in this olive oil crust, and we started talking about it. And then the next time I hung out with her, she wanted to make another pie. And we started making pies, and before long I was realizing how much I really loved baking. When I was 16, I realized that I might want to go to culinary school and I got a job in a bakery. And once I started getting some professional experience than my grandma and my pie baking jumped up a notch. We suddenly went from making one pie on a lazy Sunday, hanging out together to making you know all the pies for my family's Thanksgiving, which would usually be five or six. And it was then this really special day that, right before Thanksgiving, I got to spend a day or two days with my grandma just baking. And when the dough was chilling, we would play Scrabble and cards and all of these things. Looking back on it, I also realized I was learning to develop recipes in that kitchen because I was not scared of making mistakes. Because there's something about a grandma, it's not as much pressure. I felt a little pressure sometimes in my mom's kitchen to be clean. Mom was watching a little bit like, what are you doing in there? But with Grandma, it was just kinda like, we'll get it later. We'll clean it later. We'll deal with it. Let's just eat the pie. So I realized that, like, really my love for creating new ideas and new recipes kind of happened in that little kitchen, and when I bake pies now it's still like my grandma is here. She passed away several years ago, but I feel her around me with every pie I bake. I know like when I make a really good one, I'm like Grandma, you feel this, are you getting this pie? This is a perfect one. And so it's just something that I've had a very emotional, sentimental attachment to for a long time. And once I got professional training, I realized how many bad pies there are out there. And I was like, so many people think they don't like pie or that pie is complicated, but that's partially because sometimes they're using a recipe that isn't as clear. Maybe it's a really old recipe, maybe it's a recipe from their grandma, and it's missing some information or who knows. But also the number of people who had bad grocery store pies and think that that's what a pie is. I just realized that it was always going to be an area of passion for me, as you can tell by that 15-minute response.
(Erin and Kristen laugh)
Kristen: And I'm sure you're feeling this right now. You're just so hyper-engaged with everything, every person that you're talking to about the book, everyone who's in your audience following you. You always are. But it reaches this extreme peak right around when a book is dropping. Do you feel that right now?
Erin: Yeah, for sure. It's interesting because this is always my busiest time of year because it's with pie season for lack of a better term. it was always my busiest time of year, and I don't know why that didn't really compute when I was like ah yes, my book will be coming out right before Thanksgiving. I mean, it's a great time for it to come out. But it's also one of those nerve-wracking times, and we have basically become a full-fledged pie factory in my house. We have at least five pies in the house at any given time. There's so much going on, and what's really the funniest thing is after the photoshoot for The Book on Pie, no amount of pies seems impossible anymore. Because we made so many and granted, we had a lot of help. But my assistant, now I give her a prep list with, like, eight or nine pies on it and it's just like only eight today. It’s really a pie factory.
Kristen: What are they all for? They're all just for different places that you're writing stories for in different videos you're doing?.
Erin: Yeah, I think it's a good thing about me, but I also drive myself crazy because I can't just make one pie. When someone asks me something about pie, I'm just like, oh my God, what about Savory? What about custard? What about cream pies? What about minis? I just have all these things that I think about. So I did something this week where we had seven pies just because they wanted some nice variety and the next episode of Bake It Up a Notch is coming out soon, And I think for that one we made in one day we filmed two episodes, but we made 22 pies for that for those two episodes. So yeah, there's a lot of pies going on around here. And in the book, there are 140 full pie recipes. And within that, as you said, you can take a filling from this one and mix it. There are 40 plus crusts, 50 plus toppings, and 140 plus full recipes. So within that, the Pie-stabilities are truly endless.™
Kristen: This is The Genius Recipe Tapes. We'll be right back.
Kristen: There were a couple of questions that came in from the listener CupofAmbition. One is if you could eat only one pie for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Erin: Oh my gosh, that's so hard, I guess if I could only eat one, and I can't believe I'm going to even say this, I normally avoid answering these questions and name three. I think it would be coconut cream. That was my gateway pie, and it still does it for me.
Kristen: On the other questions from CupofAmbition is what is Brimley's favorite pie?
Erin: That is actually a great question. I'm probably going to get someone who tells me this is really bad and I don't do it all the time, of course. But Brimley loves pie crust, he loves it. And when I'm doing things in the kitchen and there's this one technique I do where you par-bake it and you use scissors to trim it after it's come out of the oven. And when I do that just occasionally, you know it falls and he can hear the scissors cutting through the dough. And he's by my side, waiting for the fallen crust. Like owner, like dog, I guess. But he's also particularly fond, I feel like he'll be okay with me speaking for him. I actually made a pie in the book that has a Brimley sifted on it in powdered sugar. So even though he doesn't know what flavor that pie and has never eaten it, I think that would be his favorite because it's a Brimley pie.
Kristen: I know that the version you did on Food52, you used your grandma's doily, you said. I don't have any doilies in my house. We were joking before this call about making a lightbulb stencil. And I thought you know what? We have light bulbs.
Erin: So one of my favorite things that Katie did was she put a pie server onto the pie and sifted over it. And you know how a lot of pie servers have little cut-outs. So when she lifted it up, there were these little patterns. We also used cookie cutters. We set cookie cutters on the pie and sifted it over and then just lifted the cookie cutters off and they left their shape behind. And one of my favorite ones that we did, we just threw some sugar at it, very Pollock-y. Just let the sugar fall where it may. I have different flavors of sugar in the book, like matcha sugar and cocoa sugar. So we used different colors and threw different ones, and we had this splatter effect that was very cool.
Kristen: There were a couple of people who asked, both What Abby Cooks and Jillian Conroy asked about preventing butter from leaking out. They said they've tried everything, making it super cold, tossing it in flour, super hot oven, and things still leak. What are your tips?
Erin: Okay, great question and just know you are not alone. Because butter is the hardest medium, so to speak in the pie dough world. So one thing you could try if you can continue to have problems, is you could use 50/50 butter and shortening. That's one thing you could definitely try. And it might just be that your particular oven, your particular mixing method, is going to do a little bit better with that, And then once you have had a few successes, you could even scale down how much shortening is in there and keep going. But the other one I want to suggest is something that is in my book, and it's also familiar to Kristen. It's different, but it's a similar concept to what you have labeled as a Genius Pie crust, which is Stella's, which I love. Hers is so great and so flaky. She does it differently than I do but we attended pastry school at the same place. I don't know if she learned it from the same instructor I did, but an instructor when I was in pastry school taught us that we could roll out the dough and just fold it into quarters before you rolled it. So sometimes I find that people who are struggling with all-butter dough, it is because of that issue that you mentioned in the question, which is that the butter is not fully coated in flour. And that's a difficult thing because when it's a dough, it looks like it's all combined, right? So even when the pieces are big to me, it looks like it's all in there. But the reality is, when you roll it, you could be stretching it in a way where some of the butter rises to the surface. And that's not necessarily a bad thing if all of the elements are working in perfect harmony. But if they aren't, what happens is without that kind of protective coating of flour, it can't release the moisture inside the butter to create the steam, and instead, it just melts before the structure sets.
So a few different things that you can try. You can try this method in my book. I call it the extra flaky method, and you can do it just one time. Just roll it out to about a half an inch thick and fold it in half and then fold it in half again, so it's in quarters. You can do it once, or you could do it twice. And just remember that the more you do it, it's going to be flakier, so it's going to need to be docked more aggressively, it's going to really puff up. So one time is enough for some people. Some people like to do it two, and then, if you keep going four times is what I do for my rough puff pastry. So that process of making layers also incorporates the butter a tiny bit more. So for some people who are consistently having trouble with that, it might be something to at least try and see if, then your butter is fully coated.
Kristen: Thank you. That's really helpful because it happens to me, too.
Erin: It usually happens because not everything is working in perfect harmony, right? You either didn't chill it long enough. Your oven isn't quite hot enough, whichever one it is. But when I hear people say no, I've tried all those things. I even recognized one of those usernames, So she's probably, like, asked me before, and she's like It's still not working McDowell!” So I think that would be the next step to try. You can either mix up your fats or you can try this little fold. Which I really think is helpful and who was ever mad at flakier dough? Not I.
Kristen: So there were also some questions about transporting and storing pies. Those came in from Me, George, and Mary Ann Toro.
Erin: Usually in someone's lap. (laughs) No, I'm just kidding. Like in the car, someone hold it. No. Sometimes I put them just in a small cardboard box or even, we call them bus tubs because we work in restaurants, Derek and I. So we have, like large Tupperware tubs in our house that we can use to carry things like that in. Another thing that could be helpful is to set [the pie] in another baking pan, where it won't have a lot of room to move. So you know, like a round casserole dish, or even a 9” by 13” [casserole dish]. If your pie plate comfortably fits in, it won't be able to shift around in as many directions. And that gives you a little security if you're whether you're carrying it or whether you're transporting it in like a car. If you're taking a pie somewhere if it's possible to just not add the topping until you get there, even if you have it in a bowl. If you can apply the whipped cream when you get there, then you have a little less concern. Because if anything happened to the pie, you could just put that stuff on top when you get there and you know it's all taken care of. But I actually find that when they're properly baked, pies are quite sturdy, and they really aren't terribly fragile in the way that a cake you're like, “Oh, is it gonna fall over? Oh my gosh, what's happening?”
Kristen: Well, I have just one last question for you, which is what Is your Thanksgiving gonna look like this year?
Erin: That is a good question. I'm still not sure. My brother always jokes that my Instagram DMs around the week of Thanksgiving is my 24 Hour Pie-sis Hotline. So it's like everybody's asking me and, like a lot of people are asking in real-time like, is this right? What should I do? And so I usually try to carve out a little bit of time just to be available for people to answer some questions. And I'm not going to visit my family this year. So I imagine there might be some Zoom dinners in our future. Another thing I was thinking about is I might just make the whole Thanksgiving dinner pie. I actually did that one year on Food52. I made a three-tiered Thanksgiving dinner all in one. But since it's just my husband and dog, and I don't think I need to do that, I thought maybe I'll make a turkey pot pie instead of like a turkey this year and. And then, of course, like maybe two or three pies for dessert.
(Erin and Kristen laugh)
Kristen: Well, I hope you have a really great Thanksgiving, even though it's a very different and strange Thanksgiving compared to other years.
Erin: Well, there is still so much to be thankful for right? And one of the things that I think about is that we at least have this ability to talk with one another in this way. Whether it's a real source of comfort or not, my Dad was in the Peace Corps in Peru. And when he used to tell me that it would take a month or at least several weeks for letters to get to and from his parents and back to him. And when I think about that, now that I can just literally look at my Dad's face any time of the day that I want to. So there's a lot to be thankful for. We're all still close, even if it's virtually close, and we can always be thankful for pie.
Kristen: Truer words were never spoken.
Erin: And scene.
(Erin and Kristen laugh)
Kristen: (voiceover) What are you cooking this Thanksgiving? If you stumble on something Genius, I would love to hear about it at genius@food52.com. Our show was put together by Coral Lee, Emily Hanhan, and me, Kristen Miglore. If you like The Genius Recipe Tapes, be sure to rate and review us. It really helps. See you next time.