Pies

25 Aug 2019

Yesterday marked the culmination of a multi-year baking project: I made every pie in the cookbook First Prize Pies!

I was given the cookbook as a Christmas present in 2015, and thought it would be fun to do a “year of pie” with the goal of making three pies per month in 2016. I didn’t quite hit the stated goal of 36 pies, but it was certainly a success… I made somewhere in the low 30s. By comparison, 2017 was a quiet year for pie-making, in part due to wedding preparations. In 2018 Claire and I did a Great American Roadtrip and the pie-making picked up again: when we visited someone on the road, we usually managed to make a pie as a thank you. Heading into 2019, I realised I was about two-thirds of the way through the book, so I figured I should go ahead and make the rest. Of course, by that time, we had moved to New Zealand, so some of the ingredients were a little difficult to find (cornmeal, green tomatoes, Concord grapes, etc)! But find them I did, with a little help from my friends.

As part of the Great American Roadtrip, we met up with the author of First Prize Pies, Allison Kave, in Brooklyn. She very graciously took time out of her workday to chat with us and sign the cookbook and we even got a selfie together. (I tried to play it cool and not be overly excited, but I was freaking out on the inside.)

I put together a photo collage to commemorate the end of the project:

It’s not quite one photo per pie… there were two I forgot to take photos of (Butterscotch Cream and Oatmeal Molasses). Otherwise, every pie is represented in there at least once. Actually, I wrote a small Python program to randomly generate photo collages, which was a fun side-project off the main project.

Looking back

Overall, this was a fun, interesting, and of course tasty project!

I fell into the project unintentionally – the idea of making everything in a cookbook seemed really intimidating so I don’t think I would have managed it as an intentional goal.

One of the unexpected parts of making a lot of pies is that you make a lot of people happy :) Pie is a simple pleasure and life needs more simple pleasures.

First Prize Pies is an excellent cookbook and I highly recommend it. Most of the pies (50+ of the 75 total) were FANTASTIC. There are a few weird pies in there; some of them were excellent (Avocado Cream, Elvis aka peanut butter/banana/bacon, Malted Chess) and some were merely good, usually because I thought they would be really weird and was then underwhelmed by how normal and nice they were (Licoricious, Persimmon, Green Tomato, Root Beer Float). There were only two duds that I straight up disliked (Melopita where I got the wrong kind of cheese, and Oatmeal Molasses) which is pretty darn good out of 75 pies total.

I haven’t decided if I’ll set any more cookbook completionist goals. I’m no longer intimidated by the idea; rather, it seems unlikely I’ll find another cookbook where I’m excited by such a high percentage of the recipes. I do plan to heavily explore other cookbooks but I don’t think I’ll feel compelled to go for 100%. But you never know. One of the joys of the project was the surprise factor of finding out how tasty (or not) a pie was. I did not expect the vegan pie to be one of my favourites!

Many thanks to Allison for writing the cookbook, Julie for gifting it to me, and all my friends and family for helping eat the creations.

What’s next? I am going to take a break from dessert pies, though I’ll definitely be making the highlights from First Prize Pies again. In the meantime, I have two other cookbooks I’m excited to explore: Dinner Pies by Ken Haedrich (are you really surprised?), and The Great New Zealand Baking Book. Yum!

By the numbers

Pie log