Pie: 300 Tried-and-True Recipes for Delicious Homemade Pie (Paperback)

by Ken Haedrich (Author) "If you already knew how to make a perfect pastry, chances are you wouldn't be reading this..." (more)
Key Phrases: fresh whipped cream, chiffon pies, making pastry, Basic Flaky Pie Pastry, Double Crust, Basic Shortening Pie Pastry (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
At 640 pages and nearly two inches thick, Pie, the big book with the shortest possible title, is difficult to read in bed. It's hard to hold up. It weighs on the stomach. But bed is where you will want to take it, night after night, following author Richard Haedrich's lead through fruit pies, berry pies, nut pies, custard pies, turnovers, ice cream pies, and more. Headrich has the most reassuring voice in food literature, and his lifelong passion--the making and baking of all manner of pies--soon begins to fit the reader like new skin.

The first 60 pages are given over to general directions (for example, Haedrich is a firm believer in reading a recipe through to completion before lifting a finger; he rolls his dough on wax paper) and the making and shaping of crust. You will find everything you need to know about creating terrific pie crusts including a friendly pat on the back and the sage advice that great crust comes with experience. This is all but permission to bake several pies a week for the rest of your life. The 300 some recipes in Pie will help you on your way. There are 21 crust recipes alone, everything from that perfect flaky crust to Choco-Nut Press-In Pie Crust.

Ever hear of the Balaton, what sounds like the perfect pie cherry? Haedrich doesn't just give you a cherry pie recipe (there are actually nine), he tells you all about cherries (there's a box titled "Crash Course in Cherries"). And talking about cherries leads to talking about regions of the country, the people in the landscape, the fruit on the trees. You will travel endless miles of back roads with Pie. Haedrich feeds you information in easy bursts, like conversational asides, as recipe leads, as sidebars, as boxes, as how-to notes the author calls "Recipe for Success." In just the pages on cherry pie you'll find out about product sources, sanding sugar, pitting cherries inside plastic bags, lattice pie crusts, baking with kids, knotting cherry stems with your tongue, IQF (individually quick frozen fruit), and much more. And cherry pie isn't a chapter all its own, but a small part of the chapter called Summer Fruit Pies. All told there are 13 chapters in Pie.

Books like Pie don't happen overnight, or even over a year of nights. Haedrich didn't apply his considerable food writing skill to a subject he simply pulled off the shelf. While the tone may be easy going, there's nothing casual here about either the task or the accomplishment. Pie represents a considerable chunk of one man's life wedged between the covers of a book. The tens of thousands of bits and pieces of valuable information, quotes, lines of poetry, not to mention the recipes and careful instruction comes from years and years of both accumulation and winnowing down to the very best.

And all along, page after page, there's that implacably friendly, reassuring voice, leading, encouraging, enlightening. How often do you crack open a cookbook and wind up with a new best friend? Such is the nature of a great book. Such is the magic of Pie and Ken Haedrich. --Schuyler Ingle --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
No, that number's not a typo: here are 300 recipes for sweet pies, with fillings ranging from fruits to nuts, ice cream to custard. Haedrich, a cooking teacher and cookbook author (Apple Pie Perfect, etc.), shares an astonishing quantity of recipes, advice, pie history and musings on issues such as the butter vs. lard debate and his passion for sour cherries. His zeal and solid expertise make this book a worthy addition to the baker's bookshelf. There are 57 pages of information on pie crusts alone, but Haedrich's tone is clear and encouraging, as he addresses pie pans, rolling pins, pastry edges and more. The recipes range from All-Rhubarb Pie to more exotic offerings such as Watermelon Rind Pie and Carrot Custard Pie (Haedrich also includes 25 recipes for apple pie). Pie snobs, take note: each crust recipe gives instructions for making the pastry by hand, with an electric mixer or in a food processor. Similarly, Haedrich assures readers it's all right to use frozen fruit. Intrepid pie makers will be pleased with the recommendations throughout for other cookbooks and magazines, and the list of resources includes useful information on baker's catalogues, fruit farms and nut growers.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 608 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Common Press; illustrated edition edition (September 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 155832254X
• ISBN-13: 978-1558322547
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7.9 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #34,642 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

85 of 86 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pie Lover's Utopia!, September 28, 2004

By	rodboomboom (Dearborn, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Pie: 300 Tried-and-True Recipes for Delicious Homemade Pie (Hardcover)

I would easily rather have a good slice of pie than any other dessert, especially over cake. For my birthday I would order lemon maringue pie rather than cake.

Here is a compendium of 300 recipes gathered from various sources and all tested out by this pie guru.

Immediately upon receiving this newly published volume, my mouth watered and I baked three pies in three days: Watermelon Chiffon Pie; Indiana Butterscotch Pie with a Checkerboard Crust; and Caramel Apple-Pecan Pie. Each turned out fantastic! Not that hard to bake if one has baked some before, into which category I fit.

This large volume will be used as I have over 250 more luscious recipes I can't wait to try. Neat to consider making some and giving them as gifts. Why not take a pie along as a gift when attending a dinner invitation?

This book has great intro sections on pie making, equipment, resources, and around ten color photos. Each recipe comes with discussion of its origin and pointers on successfully pulling the recipe off. I especially appreciate his pointers on problematic steps in the prep, and what results to expect as one proceeds.

This is just an amazing work, and the world of pie lovers will truly embrace it!

41 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Buy it for recipe collection to supplement book on technique., August 28, 2006

By	B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Pie: 300 Tried-and-True Recipes for Delicious Homemade Pie (Hardcover)

`Pie' by culinary journalist and editor, Ken Haedrich is an imposing tome of 639 pages that the author freely admits is the largest single book on this subject. And, in my experience, he is probably right, although Rose Levy Beranbaum's `The Pie and Pastry Bible' weighs in at 692 pages, although it is not exclusively about the classic American sweet pie with its characteristic 9 or 9 ½ inch diameter and sloping sides, which distinguishes it from the French tart.

While sheer size alone suggests this book has a lot going for it, the contents confirm that this is a serious reference of recipes and techniques for that great American dessert. Unfortunately, this may still not be the very best text you can get on making good pies. There are three major reasons for that opinion.

First, the aforementioned `Bible' and Susan Purdy's `As Easy as Pie' are both superior texts for presenting good illustrated techniques for how to deal with all the ins and outs of making that elusive tender and flaky piecrust. Haedrich has very few diagrams to illustrate his techniques. The only one I saw was a series of diagrams for assembling a lattice top crust which you commonly see on cherry pies. Other techniques such as pastry cutouts may have been decorated with a single drawing, but hardly a full illumination of the subject. This is doubly irksome as Haedrich's basic technique for transferring the rolled pastry to the inside of the pie plate is not the most common method. In fact, I find his recommended method just as prone to mishaps as the three other methods I have seen or read about.

Second, I really didn't find his coverage of pie pastry methods to be as complete as what we have in the two other references I cite. Unlike Beranbaum and Purdy, Haedrich is just a bit too connected to a particular technique for each task. He even goes so far as to `debunk' some methods such as the technique of rolling pastry dough out between two pieces of plastic. Now it just so happens that based on a demonstration done by my hero, Alton Brown, on an episode of Good Eats, I actually used this method, using a disassembled freezer storage bag for the plastic, and I am happy to say it worked like a charm. Since it was very easy to flip the pastry over and reflour its surface now and again, I was able to roll it out to a very decent circle with no mishaps. And, I had no problems transferring it to the pie dish using the fold in half method. Beranbaum and Purdy tend to give us a range of possibilities, and let us pick the method that works best for us. I find it especially odd that Haedrich doesn't include a description of the classic French technique for working butter into pastry, which Purdy covers to excellent effect.

Third, for a book this big dedicated exclusively to pies, I would have expected it to cover all the standards, then move on to variations. Oddly, I discovered that almost every `classic' pie recipe I looked for was missing from this book. I looked for a standard peach pie recipe and found only some variations which used some expensive ingredients I was not prepared to buy (I stuck with my old favorite from Purdy's book). I looked for a classic mince pie recipe and only found a Mincemeat - Green Tomato pie. This is not a very practical recipe for Thanksgiving and Christmas, when we are most inclined to make a mincemeat pie. (Purdy comes through again with a great method for jazzing up jarred mincemeat preparations.) I could also find no references to `tarts' at all, even to the classic Tarte Tatin (French Apple Pie). I suspect the Tarte Tatin is probably covered in the author's Apple Pie book.

All this means this book is not quite the DEFINITIVE volume it hopes to be, but that doesn't mean it is not a very good book to have if you happen to really like baking pies. I highly recommend it as a second book after you have Susan Purdy's excellent and inexpensive trade paperback `As Easy as Pie' (There are some other Purdy pie books which are really abridgments of the larger book. Try to get the original.) If you can't find Purdy's book, Nick Malgieri's `Perfect Pastry', also in paperback, is a great manual for basic techniques, especially since his techniques are illustrated with photographs, if that works better for you. While Barenbaum's book is, in many ways, the best of the lot, it tends to be oriented to professional baking methods, and it spends a lot of time explaining the whys and wherefores behind the techniques.

Haedrich has two important things going for him. First, the book is a very easy read. You will enjoy yourself wandering through his opinions on pies and pie making techniques, even if you rely more heavily on other texts. Second, this is a huge collection of PIE recipes. If you have no interest whatsoever of venturing into the world of tarts, galettes, or some other fancy European pastry, this book will keep you occupied for years, as long as you have at least one good reference like Purdy for the standards. It is also nicely priced, being about $6 less (or even less if you get the paperback), list price, than Beranbaum's similarly sized volume (although Beranbaum's Bibles are worth every penny for the serious baker).

A very good source for pie recipes overall.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sweet, savory, and very highly recommended, January 6, 2005

By	Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

Other pie cookbooks on the market range from the mix-based quick pie guide type to the master recipe collection intended for advanced cooks: Ken Haedrich's Pie: 300 Tried-and-True Recipes For Delicious Homemade Pie falls somewhere inbetween the two, providing beginners with an exceptionally easy basic understanding of how to cook a pie, while packing in dishes from bakeries, cooks and specialty shops across the country. Pie features tried-and-true recipes for 300 delicious creations, all of them sweet, savory, and very highly recommended