2nd Place in the Pie Competition

Not half bad for my first time!

I called my pie 'Star Kissed Strawberry' and, as the name suggests, it was a baked strawberry pie.  Most strawberry pies are fresh rather than baked so I thought it might be fun to make a pure baked strawberry pie.

To keep it interesting I infused a homemade strawberry jelly with star anise, rosewater, and lemon peel before adding the fresh strawberries.  This added a depth to the pie without taking away from the strawberriness.  I also dusted the top crust with aniseseed sugar to echo the star anise in the filling.

I'm not entirely sure how it tasted because I've never made this exact pie before and I couldn't stay for the tasting.  I had class.  The contest was a berry pie contest through the farmer's market.  I'll post a link to the recipe - they'll be featuring it on the website.

Reflecting on my first-ever pie competition, I learned lots:

• Stay for the judging.  I really want to know what the judges thought.  I liked my spice/flavouring combination but an external opinion(s) would have been great.
• Don't cut patterns into the outer edges of the top crust.  If you look at the picture at the bottom of the page, you can see that a lot of the filling bled through.  This is because I cut stars into the edge of the crust.  Instead of coming out clearly the filling just bubbled through and destroyed my lovely stars.  It looks messy rather pretty and in this case I would have preferred pretty.
• Simple is better.  Don't go fussing around with anything super fancy if you haven't tried it before and you're new to competitions.  This isn't Top Chef and you want to build your confidence up.  Simple and yummy beats fancy and strange tasting every day of the week.
• Brushing with egg and sugar makes the pastry gorgeously golden brown.  This is great to make pie cut-outs stand out or to accent certain parts of the pie.  Look at the star above for a beautiful example.

Besides mulling over pie competitions, I also began to wonder when people started making pies.  It turns out that pies have been around since the Neolithic Stone Age or 9500 years before the common era making them more than 12500 years old.  Clearly pies have aged well.  Ancient Egyptians started making pie to preserve food.  The earliest Egyptian pies wrapped honey in ancient forms of pastry, yummy.  Doesn't food preservation seem to be a common reason for the development of new food technology?  Food preservation or decadence.

From there, pie kept developing and transforming as new cultures put their own stamp on it.  My ancestors from Great Britain loved their meat pies with the cornish pasty being a well-known meat-filled treat.  When the pie crossed the Atlantic Ocean First Nations people showed settlers berries, and fruit pie became a popular and delicious North American staple.

Now that I have one competition under my belt, I am raring to enter another pie competition!  I have found BBQ-on-the-Bypass, which is a BBQ cook-off as well as a pie competition.  Plans are underway to enter pies in at least two of the categories so check back in September to see how I do.

References

• History of Pie

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Shonagh explores the guts of food in An Offal Experiment

My first pie competition...

And I was a wreck.  I had made two test pies.  One was perfect - the second was a horrific disaster.  The disaster pie led to a reworking of my pie plans, a subtraction of sorts.  I am definitely the type of person who likes to overcomplicate, subtraction is not my forte.  While I know this is my pattern, I generally don't catch it early enough.  Ahhh... getting older.

So there I was the day before the competition, ready to start the most nerve wracking part - the pastry.  Here is my process.

1. Put bowls in the freezer.  One large bowl for the flour, one small bowl for the butter and one measuring cup for the liquid.  Freak out a bit that I didn't put the bowls in sooner.  Will they get cold enough???

2. Sift a whole pile of flour into a bowl before measuring two cups into the large bowl, add salt and return bowl to freezer.

3. Grate a cup of butter into the small bowl.  Freak out that my fingers might be melting the butter.  Return grated butter to the freezer.

4. Take measuring cup out, crack egg into it and whisk.  Add water and vinegar.  Return to freezer.

5. Put the timer on for 15 minutes because that seems like the correct thing to do.

6. When timer goes off, gather up my nerves and start "making the pastry."  Ahh!  What if I screw it up?  Put some flour in the bottom of a bowl, sprinkle a bit of grated butter on top.  Put more flour on top of the butter and then add more butter.  Continue layering flour and butter on top of each other.  Mix up gently with a fork - put the combined butter and flour back in the freezer.

• A great tip I learned is that the key to flakiness is to coat the butter in the flour rather than mix them together.  That is why coldness is key.

7. At this point I needed a walk.  I was approaching a key moment in the pastry process and I needed something to steel my nerves.  In my case the necessary steel came in the form of coffee and chocolate.  Cocoa Nymph just opened a new chocolate bar in the 'hood and this was the perfect opportunity to check it out.  I bought the Elphaba and Barnabas the Tortoise.  The Ephaba was my favorite, filled with pistachio, rich and creamy. Now, I was ready.  Alert and fidgety from the caffeine.  On edge.

8. The flour and butter is taken out of the fridge.  The chilled measuring cup with egg, vinegar, and water is taken out of the freezer and sprinkled on top.  Quickly, fueled by your anxiety, mix the liquid into the flour with a fork.  Using your hands, rub the pastry mixture together.  Do this as much as necessary but as little as possible.  If the pastry starts to hold together you are done.  Don't touch it anymore.

9. Thank your (G)godesse(s) that you have finished the major steps, separate the pastry into two, saran wrap and put in the fridge for at least an hour.

10. Now it is time for the rolling and the putting in the pie tin.  Another key step.  The saran wrap is the key.  Don't use parchment or wax paper.  They don't work.  Saran wrap does.  I think this is because the saran conducts heat slightly so the butter melts slightly and then sticks to the saran, making the process of transferring the crust to the pie plate infinitely easier.  Once the crust is rolled out to a nice thinness, peel off one side of saran and flip into the pie plate.  Trim the excess pastry, use it to patch the crust, wrap and then place (place) in the freezer.

11. Roll out the top crust.  Cut to the size needed for the top crust and place (place) in the freezer.

12. Take a deep breath and let it out.

13. The next day, fill the pie with filling, put the top crust on and bake it.  See isn't making pie easy?

A few notes:

• Anxiety, as I hope you have noticed, is a necessary ingredient when making pastry.  If you have no anxiety then you will fail.
• Two other necessary ingredients are speed and coldness.  The anxiety fuels both.  If you forget or get careless about either speed or coldness your pastry is ruined.
• Perfectionism is also useful if it further fuels your anxiety.  Other stimulants, such as coffee and chocolate are also useful.
• Pastry no-no's: a laissez-faire attitude, warm hands, a warm kitchen.