Let’s Give the Pie Crust a Little Love

Pie filling gets a lot of attention. Chocolate, lilikoi, coconut, apple, macadamia nut… when people talk about their favorite pie, they usually start with what’s inside it. But today, we think it’s time the crust gets a little appreciation too. Because without a good crust, you’ve basically got a bowl of filling. Which might still be delicious…but it’s not pie. A good pie crust actually has a surprisingly difficult job. It needs to be tender, but strong enough to hold everything together. It should be flaky without completely falling apart the second you pick up your fork. And it needs to complement the filling without stealing the show. Then there’s consistency. When you’re making pies day after day, you want that crust to turn out the way it’s supposed to every single time. That’s where experience becomes just as important as the recipe. Baking is part recipe and part learning how to pay attention. A recipe can tell you exactly how many ounces or grams of an ingredient to use. It can tell you how long to mix something and what temperature to set the oven. But eventually, you also learn what dough is supposed to feel like. You start noticing when something isn’t quite right. You learn that temperature, humidity, weather and even ingredients don’t always behave exactly the same way every day. Sometimes the dough tells you more than the recipe does you just have to know how to listen. That’s the part of baking most customers never see.

When you walk into The Right Slice, hopefully what you see is a case filled with beautiful, finished pies ready to be enjoyed. What you don’t see are all the little steps that happened before those pies made it into the case: the measuring, mixing, rolling, flour everywhere, timers going off, oven doors opening and closing, cooling racks filling up…and the dishes. But every once in a while, it’s fun to pull back the curtain and share a little bit of what goes into something that might look simple when it reaches your plate. There’s a whole lot of work, practice and attention behind every pie and the humble crust is doing a lot more heavy lifting than it gets credit for.

So today, we’re officially giving the crust its moment. And now we need your help settling a very important pie debate: Are you a CRUST person or a FILLING person? Some people happily eat the filling and leave that beautiful crust sitting on the plate. Others think leaving crust behind is practically a crime.  Which side are you on?