For much of Seattle, late summer is the season of too much. The season of overburdened branches, yards strewn with rotting fruit, and empty shelves in the canning sections of supermarkets. The season when mysterious bowls appear in office lunchrooms with a desperate "Free!!!!" sign. The season when neighbors who think they're going to receive a handful of plums are handed a swollen shopping bag, soaked in the corners with juice.
Kevin P. Casey
Alyssa Lewis at work: seasonal fillings, classic crust.
Kevin P. Casey
Racking them up at Seattle Pie.
Location Info
Details
Related Content
More About
This is the season of pie.
The June strawberries are gone and the pie cherries—if you ever found them—an expensive memory. The markets are still rich in raspberries, blueberries, peaches, and the omens of the oncoming apple glut, as well as the occasional box of more esoteric pie fruits like gooseberries and huckleberries. Seattle's food bloggers have stirred up a frenzy around the joys of canning, and many of us are pickling more seriously than we ever have, but pies—good pies—seem to be hard to find. Why?
For the reason that pie disappeared from restaurant menus in the 1970s and '80s, ceding ground to the crisp and the crumble: fear of pastry. Seattle isn't a pieless city, but it's one where pie is perhaps at its nadir, even at a time when the interest in fresh, local food is at its peak. There are glimmers of a comeback: a couple of new pie bakeries, a cooking teacher devoted to pies.
We need more.
My Midwestern childhood memories are larded up with pies. The fresh strawberry pies, with fat dollops of barely thawed Cool Whip, that marked early summer dinners, and which my mother continues to make, though she scoops out a curl of soy ice cream to go on the side. The pie table at church potlucks and the dozens of French crumb apple pies our congregation baked for the annual Mennonite relief fundraiser sale. The brown-bag apple pie that my mother taught me in college, and which I still make every now and again with a mix of heirloom apples from the farmers market.
To me, pie crust should not be a neutral element. You should taste the fat and wheat in it, as well as feel the crust slake apart, rasping your tongue as the sheets of dough come apart. The argument over how to make a good pie crust pops up now and then in the media, sparked by a fad like vodka or duck-fat crusts, and the debate holds as much interest for non-pie makers as a fantasy-football debate in ballet school. Crsut-making is almost an elitist pursuit.
Jenny Christensen may have had to shut down her Pies by Jenny farmers market stand because she couldn't make the money work, even charging $30 for her big, organic-fruit-filled pies. But you can't cheap out, either. The least expensive pies I tasted this past month—a $10 organic peach pie from the Whole Foods bakery in South Lake Union and the $3.50 mini-pies and "flipside" turnovers by High 5 Pie, which pie-maker Dani Cone sells out of her Fuel cafes—didn't satisfy the craving precisely because of the crust. The pies have sat on the shelves so long that their all-butter or butter-and-shortening crusts have softened into mere dough. (Also, there's enough flour and cornstarch in the fillings to turn them gummy.) The $18 Whidbey Pies marionberry and peach pies I picked up from Metropolitan Market, baked by the famed cafe in Greenbank, tasted wonderful—just enough sugar to balance the acidity of the fillings, giant chunks of soft fruit with vivid flavor—but from their stolid, only somewhat crumbly crusts I could tell they would have been twice as good before they were packed in plastic and stored in a refrigerated case.
No, pie has to be fresh, and the closer to the oven you consume it, the better.
Pocket-sized Shoofly Pie in West Seattle became the first all-pie shop to open in town in July 2007, and Kimmy Hsieh Tomlinson is a proponent of the all-butter crust in her quiches, pot pies, and desserts (check her Web site for the season's menu). The butter caramelizes slightly as it cooks, and when her crust is fresh, it breaks apart in long, delicate shards. Her recipe shows best in her cream pies, when she bakes the crust separately, then fills it, say, with banana custard and whipped cream. And her cherry pie has the perfect balance of sweet to savory, crunch to gush. But butter crusts seize up quickly, and in the double-crusted pies that bake the longest (apple) or contain the cake-like shoofly filling, the crust seems to solidify into a brick.
Closer to the pie shops of my childhood is the brand new Seattle Pie Company on Magnolia's commercial strip. With its simple wood paneling and black walls, tabletop burners next to the counter for making Swedish pancakes, and a decor that's evolved each time I've visited, it's clearly a shoestring operation—a literal mom-and-pop shop, except that owners Alyssa and Patrick Lewis have a few years to go before they even hit 40. Alyssa, who learned to bake at the Snohomish Pie Company, calls large grown men "darlin'." It's clearly a conscious choice, but with such a wide smile she charms her way past affectation; instead, you appreciate her nod to tradition. Darlin' is the perfect pie-lover's sobriquet.
