Pies and Pastry
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Wikipedia-Article "Pies"
- This article is about the baked good, for other uses see Pie (disambiguation).
A pie is a baked dish, with a baked shell usually made of pastry that covers or completely contains a filling of meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, cheeses, creams, chocolate, custards, nuts, or other sweet or savoury ingredient. Pies can be either "one-crust," where the filling is placed in a dish and covered with a pastry/potato mash top before baking, or "two-crust," with the filling completely enclosed in the pastry shell. Some pies have only a bottom crust, generally if they have a sweet filling that does not require cooking. These bottom-crust-only pies may be known as tarts or tartlets. One example of a savoury bottom-crust-only pie is a quiche. Tarte Tatin is a one-crust fruit pie that is served upside-down, with the crust underneath.
Blind-baking is used to develop a crust's crispiness, and keep it from becoming soggy under the burden of a very liquid filling. If the crust of the pie requires much more cooking than the chosen filling, it may also be blind-baked before the filling is added and then only briefly cooked or refrigerated.
Pie fillings range in size from tiny bite-size party pies or small tartlets, to single-serve pies (e.g. cornish pasty) and larger pies baked in a dish and eaten by the slice. The type of pastry used depends on the filling. It may be either a butter-rich flaky or puff pastry, a sturdy shortcrust pastry, or, in the case of savoury pies, a hot water crust pastry. Some pies of British origin, such as shepherd's pie, have a shell or covering constructed of mashed potato.
Occasionally the term pie is used to refer to otherwise unrelated confections containing a sweet or savoury filling, such as Eskimo pie or moon pie.
Sweet pies are often served with a scoop of ice cream, in a style known as à la mode. This was popularized by Jordan Jackson.
The Australian meat pie has an iconic cultural status. Many different types of small commercially-produced pies are a popular form of takeaway food in Australia and New Zealand, with the most widespread brand in Australia being Four'N'Twenty. Many bakeries and specialty stores sell gourmet pies for the most discriminating customer. A peculiarity of Adelaide cuisine is the Pie floater. In New Zealand, the pie is a common part of a workday lunch.
Pies with fillings such as pork, steak and kidney, minced beef and onion, or chicken and mushroom are popular in the UK as take-away snacks. They are also served with chips as an alternative to fish and chips at British chip shops. The residents of Wigan are so renowned for their preference for this food-stuff that they are often referred to as "Pie Eaters" (though the historical reasons for this title are disputed).
As with dumplings, many cultures have independently discovered pies as a useful and delicious way to utilize otherwise useless ingredients left over in the household.
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Savoury pies
Sweet pies
Pie crust(s)
Pie in popular culture
Pies are favourite props for humour, particularly when aimed at the pompous. Throwing a pie in a person's face has been a staple of film comedy since the early days of the medium, and real life pranksters have taken to targeting politicians and celebrities with their pies, an act called pieing. Activists sometimes engage in the pieing of political and social targets as well. One such group is the Biotic Baking Brigade. "Pieing" can result in injury to the target and assault or more serious charges against the pie throwers [1]. In Des Moines, Iowa, in 1977, singer and anti-gay-rights activist Anita Bryant became one of the first persons to be "pied" as a political act. See List of people who have been pied.
Pie is regularly referenced in many contexts, often to inexplicably humorous ends. Pie itself may be an inherently funny word, or it may be that it is the thought of actual pie which adds humour to a situation. In any case, the following are but a few of the innumerable pop culture references to pie that could be listed.
- In British popular culture, a person who is overweight is often subject to the chant of, "Who ate all the pies"
- Garrison Keillor's radio show A Prairie Home Companion regularly thanks a fictional sponsor named Beebopareebop Rhubarb Pie, which supposedly sells frozen rhubarb pies.
External links
History of Pie
Wikipedia-Article "Pastry"
Pastry the name given to various kinds of dough made from ingredients such as flour, butter and eggs, that are rolled out thinly and used as the base for baked goods. Common pastry dishes include pies, tarts, and quiches.
A good pastry is very light and airy, but firm enough to support the weight of the filling. The shortening is distributed between the flour-and-water in many thin layers or sheets; when baked, the resulting pastry is delicate and flaky.
Good pastry must be uniformly mixed to achieve this layering, and should not have any large bubbles of air in it, as these will expand during cooking and spoil the texture. However, overworking of the pastry will cause long gluten chains to form, resulting in a tough product. Thus the manufacture of good pastry is something of a fine art.
As pastry must be baked to be edible, and pie fillings often do not need extra baking, many pie recipes involve blind-baking the pastry before the filling is added.
Some types of pastry are:
- Choux pastry
- Danish pastry
- Phyllo pastry
- Hot water crust pastry
- Kolacky pastry
- Puff pastry
- Shortcrust pastry
- Suet pastry
- Spanish pastry
- Strudel pastry
Small cakes, tarts and other sweet dishes involving pastry are often called 'pastries' after their primary ingredient, and bakers and chefs who specialise in producing them are called Pastry chefs.