Apple, Pecan and Pumpkin Pie

There we go. And you know, you have the capability to hit record since you're a co-host. Oh, you can let people in, you can record, you can pause, you can do all those cool things too.

Yep.

So we're set, we got camera number 2 going, we're all good to go, and we're gonna make some pies. If you're out there, tell a little bird, please, we would love to have you do that, makes us happy.

And talk to us about your pies, your favorite pies, everyone. You know, tell us what you love and your secrets and your tips and, you know, absolutely.

We'll go for it. And if you have questions about the pies, you know, there is an open seat. Feel free to come in. Just remember, this is about what we're doing today, so be respectful of our time and space. But we'd love to have you come in. All right, so let's get going. So the first thing we're going to do with the pie is the crust. Now, I cheated today and I bought premade pie crust, and I'm going to show you what I found. Found at the store and why I bought them. But you know, you can make your own. It's not difficult to do, and I make them via food processor, which makes it even easier. And of course, it's a show day, so what are they doing outside? They're cutting my lawn.

I can't hear it.

But I was looking at some sound shields today too, but they almost look more trouble than they're worth to put up. But all right, so there's a very few ingredients for a pie crust. And one is flour, butter, and then salt, of course, and ice water. But there it changes. Some people put vinegar in. Some people put— I've seen people put vodka in. There's a variety of other things. When you make a pie crust, some people use half butter and half Crisco because the Crisco is going to make it flaky. The butter is going to make it moist.

And that's such a controversy, isn't it?

Always, always. And most successful pie bakers, you'll find, do combine it because they want the best of both worlds. But here we're going with straight butter because I don't have any Crisco in the house, to be frank with you. And, you know, and I really have never— usually don't go that way. I, I don't make pie crust that often, so I wanted to be butter. So this pie crust actually has a little bit of sugar in it too, so it's a sweet crust. All right, so not a real one, but a little bit of sweet. So Very simple to get your pie crust ready. And let me just make sure I—

Okay, but let me ask you, what, what kind of— I mean, now we're in the age of 10 million ingredients. So what kind of butter? What kind of flour?

Well, you know, my standby flour is always King Arthur's All-Purpose. All right, just because it's consistent, it's pure. I feel better about using it. It's more expensive. Although I did find an Italian, uh, organic flour, a 00, which is really nice too. So I may switch over to that. But I— King Arthur was nice enough to send me some flour, so I'm using it because, you know, I do like it. It's a good flour, a little bit more expensive. But if you ever go to a store, look for the 10-pound bags because that kind of cuts the cost down. I actually find a really good organic Sugar made from sugarcane, not from beet sugar, not from anything else. So I was surprised I found that at Sam's Club of all places, and I took back my regular evil white sugar and used this. It's a nice kind of golden— oh wow, okay, a little— it almost looks like Florida sand.

But, and you know what, I love to buy those, or I feel better psychologically buying those kind of European bar butters, you know, that are like in the fat rectangle. What do you think about those?

I love, love Kerrygold butter. And I buy— it's the only butter I ever buy salted when I buy salted butter.

Well, I buy Lorpak because I'm Danish and it's a Danish butter.

Very good too.

Yeah.

And also there's some French butters out there that are excellent. And but lately I have gone back to Plugara. I had left Plugara for a long time, and Plugara is an American European butter that is basically only available to the cooking industry.

Oh, okay. Yeah, I thought, because I haven't seen— I haven't heard of it.

Look for it, and some supermarkets do carry it, but for the most part, it comes in a 1-pound block. And it's Plugara, and it's a very— it's, it's made the way European butters are made, you know, about as expensive as a European butter. But when you get them in the 1-pound blocks, lots of times they're cheaper that way. And I get it at Restaurant Depot. I'll buy 10 pounds, throw it in the freezer until the next time I go to Restaurant Depot. So anyway, so this is very simple. We have flour, we have sugar and salt, All right, and then we're going to just pulse this a little bit, get it all mixed up. All right, and then after it's pulsed, it's nice and fine. Now we're going to add in the butter. We're going to put in half of it, and it's cold butter. I want to make sure it's cold butter. Some people will freeze it, but I, I didn't go that far.

It was—

my refrigerator is really cold, so I'm just pulsing it. Mixed in there.

So just to get like crumbs?

Yeah.

Okay.

I love that they do disable this. So if you're not— if you don't have it on right, it won't run.

I know.

That's of course, you were George Perrier with the very famous— one of what was considered the best American chef for a long time in Philadelphia at Le Bec Fin. He He decided that he didn't want to worry about the lid anymore and he disabled that feature while he cut the ends of it. He cut his fingers off.

So, oh my gosh. I need a new food processor. I, mine died. So I'm currently going crazy about food processors.

This is a KitchenAid.

Mm-hmm.

Because they're pretty dependable. And again, you know, you can get their pro brand. What is the other brand of KitchenAid? Oh bro, no, not RoboCoup. I forget the other name, but our RoboCoup is what we would call it.

Breville. Breville, I've been thinking about. That's a good quality. Yeah.

So I did put my water in the freezer. So I'm gonna put in 4, let me find my measure because I don't wanna eye this. I'm gonna put in 4 tablespoons, but I'm gonna do it half at a time. One. And some of the crusts I've made, I put egg in too. This one doesn't have any egg. Because what you want to see it do is it's going to start to form, and that's when you have enough water.

And you know, pie crust is really one of the simplest things to make, and I think it's one of the most rewarding.

It's starting to come together. You can feel it's still a little dry. We're put in one more, so that would be 5. Okay, that'll—

oh, that looks good.

So once you know it'll form, that's when you can turn it out. Now I'm going to turn it out in a bowl just so I don't make a mess. Normally I would just turn it out on the counter. And I think one day I discovered if I put it in a bowl, I could work it just as easily and not get it all over the place.

That's true.

Now work smarter, not harder.

And you know what, you know, how is it working on wood? It's great working on wood. You don't always have to work on marble, right?

Oh yeah, wood's okay. Well, I, you know, I like it because it's pretty. I get tired of that, you know, the The cutting board, the regular cutting board is very durable and very nice, but it's just, you know, I like to be happy when I'm working and this is pretty. Let's face it, even if I'm just making it for me, I'm pleasing me. I'm not really pleasing somebody else. And I like to enjoy what I'm doing.

Yeah.

Here's your pie dough. Move this over just a little bit. You can see I formed it out very nicely. Now, this is just a single pie dough. And all I'm going to do is form it, and you don't want to overhandle it, okay, because that's going to ruin it. So I'm going to put it into a mound, some plastic wrap, wrap it up, and refrigerate it. Okay, so then we're going to refrigerate it for at least a half an hour before we use it. You can refrigerate it for a few days, not going to hurt it. It's not going to hold up a whole lot more than a couple days, maybe 3 at the most, I would think. And it's going to—

will it, will it, um, can it go in the freezer?

It can go in the freezer. Oh good. Add a little more flour to it.

Okay.

And that's going to go in the refrigerator, and when I was ready to make a pie, I could pull it out, give it about 10 minutes to warm up a little bit and then roll it out. But I'm going to show you what I found. Okay, I can get rid of this. Let's move this over here. We're done with this. Let's come back to the board. Okay, I could probably do this just as easy too. Duh. Sometimes I just don't—

yeah, now we can Almost.

I wonder— there you go. There we go. Can you see it? Is it blocked or—

no, perfect, perfect, perfect.

Okay, good. All right, so now we're going to start making our pies, and it's very simple to do. Let's get our ingredients together, and then we're going to put them all together and put them in the oven. So the first thing we're going to make is we're going to make a pecan pie, and a pecan pie is not really difficult to make, just a couple items. And then Karen's here. Karen, if you want to jump in, there's a seat open if you If you're ready. Not, that's okay. So pecan pie is really pretty simple. I'm going to start with the wet ingredients first. So we're going to put in the sugar. Well, we're going to start dry and wet, actually. We're going to put in sugar.

Oh, look at that sugar.

That's nice sugar. Now that really is a beautiful organic cane and cane sugar. You know, they make sugar out of so many other things now. So that's what made me start thinking about cane sugar. So that, and now I have some light corn syrup. Don't cringe, people. Wow. Okay, pecan pie. This is a holiday pie. It's not something you eat all the time.

That's right. That's right.

Think of it that way. All right, now we have— let me find the right one. Okay, we have a teaspoon of salt. There we go. Just eye that one. We have a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon. Cinnamon, yes.

That's something I have not made before, is pecan pie. Maybe, maybe this is the year to do it.

Well, you know, it used to be such a big thing and it kind of has fallen down by the wayside a little bit. But, you know, holidays especially, you know, it's a Southern thing too. In the South, you're going to see it a lot more than you would here. All right, so we have, let's see, sugar, corn syrup, oh, vanilla, a little bit of vanilla. All right, vanilla, salt, cinnamon, and we're going to mix this up. And this is really kind of the sweet part of it, I guess, the flavorful part of it. All right. So now we have that in it. We're going to add in the eggs and we have 4 eggs that are beaten. They're going in here and I beat them ahead of time.

Oh my goodness. Look at that. Wow.

This is, this is the guts of the pie.

Yeah, it is. It looks like it.

This is really it. There's only one more ingredient we're going to put in. And that I prepared already. That is browned butter. Oh, nice.

Okay.

And that's nice. Give it a distinctive flavor. So we whisk the eggs in, put a little bit of air into it. It's going to settle, but we want to get a little air in it. Okay.

Okay.

Now what I did was I browned some butter. And that doesn't mean burning the butter, okay? Because burned butter is not a good thing. So we're going to put in, and I'm just going to try and not get all those little uglies.

I love brown butter. I love, I just love it. And you know what? It's something I always forget to, uh, to do. I mean, it's great on so many other dishes.

Oh, it's good on vegetables.

Yeah.

And I'm just, there's all this little bit of crud in the bottom. I'm not going to put that in. All right, so we got a little bit and that's okay. So now we mix in the brown butter and look at the color. Wow. And that's going to add that little bit of earthy flavor. Yeah.

Yep. That's a good, that's a good word to describe it.

Yep. Right now it tastes really good. It's got that flavor from the butter.

Okay, now I just saw you— I mean, the eggs, raw eggs are in there, so I'm nervous.

I buy— now I buy pastured organic eggs, and in the old days we didn't worry about them, you know. Okay, these are, I think, safer hens. They're not storage eggs, they're not sitting around If you worry about them, you can buy those pasteurized eggs. Like when we were at work at the school, we had to buy pasteurized eggs all the time because they were safe eggs, but they're cloudy. I remember the first time I cracked them open, I had never seen pasteurized eggs. I'm going, "Oh man, these eggs are old," because they look cloudy, funky looking.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've been doing this my whole life. If I've been making, I don't know, certain kinds of cookie dough or this or that, you You know, I've been taking tastes, you know, but then, you know, people get nervous and—

Yeah, it's again, it's me. If I get sick, shame on me. All right. Yeah, I really don't have any fear.

But you never— but you never have. I mean, I never have. And I've got it.

And I don't think you're going to get the rare chance that you're going to get salmonella. You know, it's going to come more from the shell than it's going to come from the egg. So, all right, now we're going to add in 2 cups of pecans, chopped pecans, kind of chopped. I bought some beautiful whole ones because they, you know, they were a good price.

So just— you just get them like from the can, you just get them in the grocery store, or are there other places you can—

Sam's Club.

Okay. Oh, okay.

And everybody sells them like this and it's 2-pound bag. And I think a 2-pound bag was like $11. You're buying at the grocery store and a half a pound is going to be like, or, you know, 4 ounces is going to be like $5, $6. So eat pecans, they're good for you. All right, so this is— oh, that looks good. You know what reminds me of? A Stuckey's pecan log.

Yeah, there you go.

Every time we pass, when I tell Lisa, we gotta stop there and get a pecan log. And the trick is to see if you can eat it before you throw up.

I bet you could use that filling for a bunch of different types of things, like some type of, you know, cinnamon buns or, you know, I don't know.

Right. Eggs in it. It's going to solid up. You know, I was even tempted to make it in a cheesecake pan and let it set up that way and then layer it. So if you wanted to really take it over, I've made them with chocolate, with a nice little layer of chocolate on the pecans. So I'll put it in a nice pie dish, and then I'll melt some good quality chocolate. Make it more into— you don't want to leave it plain, you want to make it more into a ganache. And a ganache is real simple. When you melt chocolate, all you're going to do is add in some heavy cream. There's only two things you can really add into chocolate unless you're a master chocolatier. That'll thin it out. One is heavy cream, one is corn syrup. Okay, if you put any other liquid in it and not being able to know how to manipulate it, it's going to seize up on you and get funky. It's going to get really bad. Okay, so, okay, when you melt chocolate, add some heavy cream into it, then you can put coffee into it. Once you break it down, it thins. Now we can add some liqueurs, some coffee, some other things, but you got to get it to that point where it's smooth. And then you can add a few other.

Wow. So yeah, see, that's where experience comes in handy.

And it's, you know, it's not a lot, but that's what you want to do. So then if we bake this nice pie and we could put a little bourbon in here too, certainly wouldn't hurt. Make it a bourbon pecan.

Oh, nice.

And you want to take this and then melt down your chocolate, put a little nice glaze of ganache on top of it, and then you could decorate it with your pecans on top of the chocolate. Or you could even, you know, make something else and put it on top.

Well, you know what I'm thinking? Can you add flour or something else and then make little balls?

I never have, but you know, that would be a nice experiment.

Or little cookies, little balls, little cookies. I mean, if you want to make two batches and you, you know, you're doing it anyway.

Oh, Brittany's there. Hey Brittany, how you doing? So now we're going to make pumpkin pie. Now I have been using the same recipe for forever since I first made my first pumpkin pie, and I had no idea what I was doing.

Yep, I have made pumpkin pie many times, including once from the actual pumpkin.

Ah, that I haven't done yet.

You know what, I never did it again.

Ah, you know, I have friends that swear by it. You know, God love you if you got the time to do it.

It didn't make a difference.

I don't think so either. I'm not a pumpkin connoisseur. So this is really the only thing that I do different. And you know, I used to make everything in my mixer, but today— and then I could get a little more volume on the eggs if I did. But today I figured, let me make it here, and I'm going to get this other whip because it's more flexible. I said, let me make everything in a bowl because not everybody has a mixer. You might want to let the kids do this. This is something kids can make really easy. Let them take turns. Yeah, I just like to get a little volume into my eggs for my pumpkin pie. Now, I don't know if it's psychological, or if it's just— if it really matters, but I think it makes it a little lighter. Now when I do this in the mixer, I really let it whip up nice.

You know what, it's funny, I never had a mixer until a few years ago. I always only had a hand mixer.

Wow.

Which was fine.

Yeah. You know, and I wish I had one sometimes because it's easier than moving. I love all of my KitchenAid mixers, but sometimes it's easier to just take it and boom it a few times.

Yep.

All right.

Yep.

So now we're gonna put in some seasonings and I have salt. And let me tell you my secret recipe.

Okay. Now, is that just pumpkin or is that pumpkin with—

No, this is 100% pure pumpkin.

Okay, so there's no other additives in it like other spices?

No, all natural, no preservatives.

That's right.

Grown in the USA.

That's right.

Grown in the USA.

That's right. That's what I'm used to forever after I did the debacle with the actual pumpkin. And that's, that's the best way to do it. The best way.

That recipe is on there. It's been the pumpkin recipe. Pumpkin. I'm telling you, I have looked on blogs, I have searched. And you know what? Everybody uses this recipe. They may add a little tweak here or there, but it's always the same. It's this Libby's recipe that's been the gold standard for pumpkin pie. Now, of course, you can take your pumpkin pie in a lot of different directions, but we're making it plain today. And on the Libby's label, the only thing I do different is it calls for a teaspoon of ground cinnamon, a half a teaspoon of ground ginger, a quarter teaspoon of ground cloves. I use— I have all those spices, but I use pumpkin pie spice. So I have 2 teaspoons of pumpkin pie spice and a half a teaspoon of salt, and that's going in here. So this, I'm just going to mix this up real good with the eggs, get it all incorporated. All the spices.

And you know what, Deborah says that she makes pumpkin cheesecake. Now that is the best of both worlds. I am crazy about pumpkin pie. I'm crazy about cheesecake.

I actually posted a pumpkin praline cheesecake on Google+, one that I had made on my blog. So here, that's, that's all we have to do, the eggs. Now we're going to put in the pumpkin. So it's 1 can of pumpkin. Very simple. If you want to make one pie— if you want to make two pies, get the big can— and two cans of condensed evaporated milk. And the only other thing you really have to make sure you have in the house is eggs and a little bit of spice.

Well, you need two pies, one for the cook and one for the, uh, company.

Yes, yes. And you know, when you're making pies, and they freeze well, all right, if you got room in your freezer, they do freeze pretty well. So we got all the pumpkin Mix that in there. And now I have made— at this point is when you can start deviating from the recipe. You know, if you like it, if you like it seasoned differently, season it differently. I have put chocolate chips into it. You can definitely top it with some nuts. I don't think I would put nuts into it, but You could top it with some nuts. You can go a lot of different ways. Pumpkin cheesecake is wonderful. Pumpkin cake is wonderful. All right, so we're here. Boom, boom, boom. We got everything there. Oh, and here we go.

And please, viewers, tell us what your favorite pies are. What, what do you make? What's your— what, what are your traditions? What, what pies do you love? Tell us about it.

And here, all we have is the condensed milk. And that, my friends, is pumpkin pie. And it's that simple to make. It's delicious, it's creamy, it's smooth. It doesn't have any extra ingredients in it, any extra additives. And you know, you don't have to buy— I bought Carnation simply because I grew up on Carnation, so that's what I buy. But store brand's fine. Store brand pumpkin is fine. Yeah, whatever you like.

So, you know, you mentioned freezing. You can freeze pumpkin pie once it's cooked. Okay, it wouldn't get all, you know, watery or—

it's going to get a little watery, but you can freeze it. You can freeze any of these pies. Yeah, just as long as you wrap them well. You know, we buy pumpkin pies while they're raw. I wouldn't try freezing a raw one. I think that would be kind of funky.

Oh no, no, no.

But I would cook it, you know, and just wrap it up well, get it nice and frozen hard, then slip it in. They sell these big Ziploc bags. We actually bought them for other things. So I found when something's too big, I slide them in those big Ziploc bags. So that's the pumpkin mixture. So now we have our pecan, our pumpkin, and now we're gonna make an apple.

And Brittany says that she used to make crustless pumpkin pies.

Yes.

And put them in little dishes. Interesting.

Absolutely. You know, and you don't have to have a crust. That was one of the things I said about using a cheesecake pan. If you want to, you could make a little bottom layer of it and bake it in that. So when you unring it, the only crust is on the bottom, a little bit on the bottom. And you could— I've never baked one, a pumpkin, without the crust in a cheesecake pan.

But what about in like those What are they called? Ramekins?

Ramekins. Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, in that case, if I was going to do that, I might throw a few more eggs in there. I want it to be more of a pumpkin custard at that point. So that's great. But I might add in maybe double the egg amount. So here I have 7 apples cut. Most of them are Granny Smiths. I had 5 Granny Smiths, which I thought was going to be enough, but I bought some new pie pans too. That took a little bit more. So I cut up 2 red galas that I had in addition. You can put pears in there if you want. You can put, you know, cranberries. We're going to put some cranberries in there. So right now I'm going to do is add in some sugar, some brown sugar, and that's a third of a cup of brown sugar. That's regular sugar. I have to think what I'm doing. For a minute. All right, and I have extra sugar. I'm trying to remember what I didn't put sugar in. Brown— oh, all right, I hear it because I hit it. Cinnamon, a little bit of salt, and then I'm just going to mix these up.

Now what about lemons?

You put lemon That's right, I didn't put the sugar in. I forgot to put the sugar in the pumpkin.

I was just— yeah, I was just wondering about that.

Not to put the sugar in the pumpkin. Okay, there we go. No harm, no foul. I remembered it went in the oven. This is why I lay things— when I'm making this much, I have all my ingredients laid out, so if I got extra— that's right, like the mechanic, I got extra ingredients.

That's true.

A couple screws left over, I know I'm in trouble. So here is— I'm just going to toss them. Now, some people cook their apples first, reduce them, get rid of some of the liquid. I don't know if I have it here or not. I'll tell you the real trick. I do not, unless I've taken and put it away. The real trick is tapioca. If you're making a fruit pie and you want to make sure, if you think it's going to be too wet, you want to sprinkle some tapioca in. Now I make a peach blueberry pie and you know how wet and gooey that can be. And that I definitely put some tapioca in. You can put some lemon in here if you want to add a little lemon, that's fine.

Yeah, I usually put lemon. I don't know if I put lemon juice or lemon zest, but that's what I've done.

Actually, I got my mixture out. That's what I was going to put in. Just rinse this off. Throw a little zest in here. See, I got as far as to get the zester out, I didn't get the lemon out. So we're just going to add some zest in here, and you just want to make sure you don't go too in— into the white. You just want the outer skin, that's where the oils are.

Now, did you peel? It looks like those apples are peeled.

Yes, I peeled them.

Okay, do they, do they have to be peeled?

Nope, whatever you like. And you can cut them however you like. I chunked them, I sliced them. If I was going to make a decorative apple pie and I was going to layer them in a pan and go around, maybe in a tart pan instead of a pie pan, I'd slice. And it all depends on time. And what I wanna do. So here I've got, all right, we've got our lemon, we've got our brown sugar. Now I'm simply gonna put in a couple spoonfuls of that beautiful cranberry sauce we made yesterday.

Nice.

Maybe 4. And I'm not gonna toss it around too much right now. We're gonna do it when we put 'em in the pan. So let's slap this over here. Let's start making our pies. I've got everything together because I want to try and get these in the oven at the same time so I'm not opening and closing the door. All right, here is what I found at the grocery store, and again, time saver. Don't make yourself crazy. Make your own pie crust if you have time and want to, but look what I found.

Oh, okay, there you go.

Unroll and bake.

Wow, is that something new? I have not seen that, anything like that before.

So I jumped on that. Um, they come like this, there's 8 of them in a bag, in a box, and all you have to do is get them out about an hour. You can thaw them in your refrigerator and then just let them warm up for a little while, or if you take them right from the freezer to take about an hour, and I've never used one, so we're going to discover together.

Hmm.

Here comes rolled, and hopefully it will come apart for me. And if not, I'll be in big trouble.

Now that— I wonder if you can get that in the freezer section too. Does it come frozen or does it come—

No, it comes frozen.

Okay.

And there's 8 of them, and I did find that at Sam's. All right, so let's just unroll it. Now I've been banging them around, so I may have mushed it, you know. I've been throwing them on the— okay, so I may have done a little bit of damage to them. Doesn't look too bad.

Looks pretty good. Yeah.

All right, so here's my pie pan. I'm just going to put it in. I'm going to see if I can stretch it just a little bit.

And you know what I like? It looks homemade. You know, you can crimp the edges and it just looks homemade, right?

You know, now I don't mind the ones that come already in the pie crust in the tins. But they're hard to handle. They, they just don't, you know, if you wanna take one out and transfer it, they just break a little. Alright. So let's— Okay. You know, and I kinda love showing you things that I've never done before because it makes you think, you know, if you're not alone in this.

Oh yeah, and it adds— it just adds some drama.

Okay, so this is a big pie pan. This is not my usual pie pan. So I tell you what I'm going to do, I'm going to bake the pecan in this.

So what is that, about an 11-inch, 10-inch?

You know, it said it was a 9-inch, but I don't know, it looks bigger than that. I think it's a deep dish 9-inch, but it was just— okay, it was a pretty pretty pie pan. So I'm just going to kind of try and salvage the best I can since I don't have really enough room to go over the fluted edges. But again, you know, this is— sometimes you're better off not having too much exterior crust because that will burn and get ugly.

That's true. And you know, that, that type looks like it might be more tender. Than the other pre-made type of crust. I want— I wonder if that's—

it looks more like crust. So now we're going to— exactly— my pecan pie mixture.

Nice. Yeah, that looks great.

Smell it.

That looks great.

You hear them cutting now?

I do.

They're right outside my door. Okay, so you can see this is a little bit— so I'm actually going to take this and go inside with it, push it down just a little. So these must be bigger than life pie pans. But you know, you can always save anything. You can always make it. I'm just gonna create—

now what, tell me, what, what are you going to do with 4 pies?

3 pies.

3 pies.

Neighbors.

Oh, oh, I, I bet your neighbors love you.

No, and especially because I'm going away tomorrow, so I'm not taking pies with me because they're going to be feeding me unbelievable. And the whole trick to doing these is two fingers, one finger.

Okay. Oh, look at that! What? You know, that's why I never have been happy, because I've made pies, I've been made pie crust forever, and I've never really been happy with my technique.

I, I'm terrible. Some people make these pies that are so pretty. Yeah, I just learned this. It's not like I've known this all my life. I saw this and went, hey, I can do that. I have 3. And you know, again, it's— I'm not trying to win a prize. I'm trying to make a tasty pie. Yeah.

Yep, that's easy. It's, you know, I mean, you can even hand that off to a kid to do.

Yeah. Oh God, yeah. Just make sure they wash their hands first.

Yeah.

All right, that's one thing. All right, so there's my pie. It's got a cute little crimped edge around it. Okay, now I've got some whole pecans. I'm just gonna—

oh good, a little, a little You know, decorative touch on the top.

Now I could line them all up and take a while. And this is definitely something you want to give a kid to do. But I'm just going to kind of haphazard. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, you can make a big happy face on it.

Oh, you could. Of course, I'm not gonna. So these— and this is not a have to do. All right. This is just— I have a lot of pecans. I like pecans. So I thought I would. It's one of those kinds of things.

So have you ever heard of the app Drop? Drop?

Drop what? Just Drop?

Just Drop?

No, I was waiting for you to finish it. That's why I want to know.

No, it's called getdrop.com. And I've been doing some looking around and this is a There's an app just for baking. Well, mostly for baking. And there's a scale that comes with it and then an app. And when they're both on and you put the ingredients, each ingredient onto the scale, a receptacle on the scale, the app tells you when it's enough, if it's too much, and step by step how to do the recipe. And it interacts with the scale.

Yeah.

So it's— yeah, it's really something I had never heard of. And it's called getdrop.com.

And scale— do you use—

it's their scale. You buy this—

oh, you buy the scale from them. Gotcha.

Buy the scale from them. And then you connect the app and then the two talk to each other.

Wow. I love it.

And it guides you step by step through the rest, through the measuring and then through the recipe.

Well, that's pretty cool.

So it's foolproof. It's foolproof.

Even I could do it. All right, so here's my pecan pie ready to bake.

Oh, nice.

All right, nice.

In the oven.

All right, pumpkin pie time. All right, I'm gonna save that for the— pumpkin pie time. Got another crust. Now this is one of my— and I've had this pan forever.

Oh, I think everyone in America has had that.

This was what I usually use, and I know something happened to them. I didn't have them all, so I figured I'd better buy a couple more. I'm just glad I remembered that.

Yeah, well, I lose those too somehow. You know, I told you how I lost my roast— my— I lose my roasting pans to collect oil. And I don't know, somehow, you know, my husband uses it for the car to collect the oil when he does an oil change.

This one's a lot. You can see this fits a lot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Much better.

All right. So this is going to go in. And the one mistake I always made that I saw people like when you roll out your doughs, your doughs are always really big and always make the mistake of trying to fold over. Get a pair of scissors. And cut it so it's reasonable. So you can work with it a little better and take that dough right off. Because if you try and just layer it and mush it and, or tear it by hand, you're gonna end up causing yourself a lot of headaches. I just saw that the other day. I said, you know, it was one of those aha moments for me. It's like, damn, now I know what I'm doing wrong.

Oh yeah. Now, would you say, you know, when you're making these pies And say you want to make it your own, let's say in terms of spices, and you're reading a recipe and the recipe says certain ingredients. With spices, how do you know how to mix it up? Or some spices are more powerful than others. So any tips about kind of precautions or—

You gotta think a lot of these aromatic spices are really strong. Cinnamon is probably the most benign of them. And I remember I had some, met some people from France. They came over to do something and I forget what I made, but had cinnamon. He goes, "You Americans use cinnamon on everything." So they found it kind of offensive that we use so much cinnamon. And we do, we do.

Yeah. I mean, I also find a little bit of nutmeg, if you add too much, that Can— especially if it's fresh nutmeg, right?

Yes. Nutmeg and cloves you have to really be careful with.

Okay.

Nutmeg and cloves are just two very powerful aromatic spices and they really aren't going to add any. And that is why I use pumpkin pie spice, you know, or— and that's why I usually don't put them in my apple pies either. Just a little too strong. I don't want to go in that direction. It's all right. So I did a little bit of crimping. You can see it looks kind of cute. So now pumpkin. And these are all kind of below the waterline, I like to say, so I don't have to worry about them bubbling out and cooking over.

That's right. I was going to mention that too. It really doesn't— that's the thing about pies, it doesn't expand.

So I don't have a cookie sheet, but normally if I was doing an apple, believe me, it would be a cookie sheet under it. All right, so last but not least, we have got apple pie. So this is going pretty well. Yeah, surprised. Almost run out of time. See, this is, this is kind of why, you know, I, I like to use these, and you can make these pies the night before or in the morning. Get up early, first thing in the morning, and make them.

Oh yeah, well, when you have a pie crust like that and all you have to do is, you know, chop the apples, put in the spices, there you go, you're home free.

All right, now this was just a little bit small. I don't want to try and lose anything here, and I need something to roll with because I still can't find my— I'm gonna have to just— I love that rolling pin I had, I still can't find it.

You lost your rolling pin.

So, okay, here's my rolling pin.

We won't, we won't see off camera what you do with that.

What, with this? Well, I wrapped it in plastic first. Okay, we'll tell you that much. So I hope everybody saw that I did that. So I didn't add any additional flour to it. I've got my hand under it, resting it. That's actually Lisa's wine. I'm not a— white wine's okay, but I prefer red.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'm a red wine drinker too.

All right, so now I did make it a little bit bigger so we have a little bit more play here. Alright, so now I'm just gonna kind of— and I don't have my scissors, so— alright, so there we're good. Pie is down. Sometimes you'll see people forking the crust if you're gonna bake it. Let's talk about that for a minute, pre-baking crust. Now let's say you're making a pie, lemon meringue or something you want to pre-bake crust for. You're gonna get your crust out, Get it done, put it down, take a fork, make little forked holes in it, cover it with foil, not wrapped with foil, just kind of laying on top of it, push down in here, get a bag of beans, pinto beans, kidney beans, any kind of beans.

Or peas, those little round peas.

Anything dry, any dried legume or something like that, pour them into the bottom of this. Okay, in the foil, take them out of the bag, and then this one, you just throw the bag down there, uh, pour them in the bottom of this, and when it bakes, it'll keep the pie from rising and bubbling and getting funky. So that's when they tell you to pre-bake a crust, that's what they're telling you to do. So if you fork it a little, put the pie weights on— they do actually sell pie weights, but yes, a bag of those beans works just as well. All right, so now what we're going to do is I'm just going to kind of. And you'll notice I didn't— I did not stir them in. Yeah, because I want to have little pockets of cranberry, and I could have added them later. I don't want the whole thing to be red, and it could be.

I love that idea. I absolutely love that idea.

I just didn't want it to be. So now we have pockets, and now if I think I need more, I can throw another spoonful in. Like I said, this would be— and you could even add it now if you did not add the tapioca and you wanted to make sure that it didn't have too much juice when you cooked it. You could sprinkle it with a little dry tapioca now. I'm just gonna—

okay, so that will kind of absorb.

It's going to absorb all, and you won't see— that's going to absorb all the juice. So now I'm just strategically dropping a few little cranberries here and there so it looks— you're never going to see it. I just want to know, makes me feel better knowing that they're there. Okay, let's just move this off here while I do one last crust for the top. Last year I did, I made a strusel topping. So this year I'm going with a crust because I wanted to try something new.

Oh yeah, I mean, I love that too. I never know what to do, the, the, you know, apple crisp kind of thing or, or basic apple pie.

Well, sometimes a little too sweet.

And that's true.

I think having changed my eating pattern a little bit, it might have been too much for me. So I'm just going to roll this out a little with my magic rolling pin.

You know, or you can make those crisscrosses. You can make strips.

Well, this is where you would do it then. Okay.

Yep.

Once you have this cut, you make your little cuts and weave, and we'll leave that for another show. But let me show you what I'm gonna do. I'm good. I've got a cookie cutter, and if you so desired, you could actually cut all these stars out and use them to do your pie with.

Isn't— now, isn't that a great idea? So simple.

Wanted to do that, you could cut them and then just layer them that way. But we're not going to do that. We're going to do is offset them, lose them all.

Great idea.

Again, just for something a little— yeah, different with the pie. And as it settles—

because you know what, you say that, that food is about your eyes, and your eyes just, you know, it's, it adds a little excitement, it adds a little drama. It's, it is a lot of enjoyment.

Okay, so let's, let's crimp. Let's get this all together and crimp, and then we'll come back and form.

And Bill says he uses a cutter with apple pattern. With an apple pattern, and then he takes the cutouts and just lays them on top.

Leaves are real nice. I see leaves all the time, and I thought of this last minute, and I went out to my shed to try again to look for my rolling pin for no avail, but I did find my Christmas cookie cutters. So I figured this was better than an angel or a snowman. So now let's make two.

That just looks so great.

And again, you know, you got— wow, this isn't a fancy one. And you know, you can get really fancy with your crust. I had this pizza baker that tried to teach me all these different things to do with them. Oh my gosh, she was so good braiding.

Yeah, you know, so therapeutic too. I mean, what else, you know, do you— what else would you think about? You know, you have the problems of the world, they just go away when you're, you know, being creative and you have the texture of the food and the taste and you have all of your senses. That's the thing about the kitchen. You have all of your senses in the kitchen.

Yeah. And, you know, it diverts your attention from your worries.

Exactly.

It's not permanent, but, you know, you get a little escape from, from the day, from, you know, what's bothering you and have a little fun.

That's right.

And then when you eat it, you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor. The most satisfying thing for me is when someone else eats what I've made and really enjoys it. And if I can make them feel better that way, then I really feel better.

I mean, that's what food, you know, that's what food is about. It's about love. I mean, you know what? We haven't really talked about that before, but it is love and it is creativity. And it is, it is beauty and it's, it's a whole lot of good things.

Yes. So now I'm going to brush a little bit of egg wash on it. Because I want this baby to gleam.

How about, how about some lighting? How about some like LEDs around it?

There you go. Too much egg there. That'll, that would be after. And you could use milk, you can use cream. Everything gives it a different kind of a sheen. A flat— with milk would give it more of a flat sheen. The egg gives it a glossy sheen. I'm just gonna try and get it.

All right, that just— that looks fantastic.

Stars.

There.

Just a little bit. And you know what? You can do this with a store pie. Buy one of those really nice deep dish pies they sell in the grocery store.

Mm-hmm.

And egg wash it. And then do this to it. This is like grain, grain granulated, raw sugar. Here we go. I knew I could say it. So now I'm putting a little, because when it bakes, I'm not worried about the sweetness at all. It's all about the texture. It's all about how it looks when it bakes, how it's gonna come out of the oven. All right. It's not perfect. This star's kind of funky, but you know what? It's your homemade pie. I'm not trying to—

That's right.

Win the fair. With it, I'm trying to serve something people know I made. And a lot of times, even with, like I said, the store-bought ones, if you take them and dress them up a little bit, you know, people—

It doesn't take much. And then people will— it just translates to it tasting better or seemingly tasting better. It really— it goes a long way.

It does. So that's our 3 pies for the day. And, um, pretty cool. So anybody have any question, wants to jump in? Someone was just here but they left. Anybody have questions about what we did or the process or pies they're making, come on in and join us. We made 3 pies today. We made a pumpkin pie, and I'm using the Libby's recipe for the pumpkin pie. It's really simple. We made a pecan pie, and I did have the link for the recipes from my page. Do you line the edges of the pie with foil? No. You know, Johnna, I, I used to do that, and with the pie shell— I don't know if you saw what I was doing with the pie pans I had. I didn't have a lot of crust, so it wasn't coming up as high, and that's definitely something you need to do. And they actually make pie shields if you really are into baking and you don't want to have to work that hard at them. They They sell these pie shields that fit right, right over the edges of the crust to keep them from getting too brown. But you can just foil them. And again, let me show you, not that I represent this company and not that I get anything from them, but I found these Pillsbury ready-to-roll-out pie shells. Now you see it's got a lattice pie on it. That— this would be perfect if you want to make a lattice pie, and especially if you think it's going to might take you a couple times to get it right, where you might need a few extra pieces of pie dough. This is really simple. And then people are going to ooh and aah when they come over because lattice takes some time because you got to lay one down, fold it over, lay one down, fold it over, lay one down, fold it over. That's why you don't see me making many lattice pies. I don't have the temperament for it. But thank you. And Susan, what did you have? Anything else for us?

Oh, I think you have you know, going over the whole, you know, thing. So, no, I just wanted to talk a little bit about organizing for ingredients. And, you know, I've discovered some, a lot of apps and a lot of, a lot of, you know, this, but, you know, I collect recipes. I collect chef's recipes. I have a lot of chef's recipes. I collect other recipes and I find, you know, we have, there's New York Times Food, there's Epicurious, there's Food Network, there's Chef's Foods. I like to put them all in one spot. So I like to put them— there's an app called Plan2Eat. Have you heard of that, Chef? It's called Plan2Eat. This is a place where it's a web clipper for your browser and you can gather all of your recipes and put them in one spot. And then you have it, you know, you have it right there. And also, you know, just handy things like an iPad stand or a cookbook stand or cookbook flip-down holder that you mount on the bottom of your wall cabinet. And then it flips down, you put your, a real cookbook there, you know, and it's really handy. I also find the iPad mini for me in the kitchen is a lot easier than a bigger iPad or a bigger laptop. You know, it just makes it a lot easier. I also have the Amazon Echo, which is, it's kind of an all-in-one useful, you know, it plays music, it's a weather reporter. And you can use that when you're in the kitchen. You can say, remind me to get brown sugar. You just say, Alexa, put on the to-do list, get me brown sugar. And then you have all of that information when you need it. So there's a lot of technological apps that we can use to make the, you know, the cooking process a lot easier. So, you know, and also even a timer, Chef. Now, this is something I do. If you— now you're going to bake the pies, you're going to bake them for what, 40, 50 minutes, you know, and say, you know, you have a place, so you want to go to another part of the house, or say you want to work on the computer. So what I do is I have a little a little lightweight app that I— a timer on my computer, and then it'll go off 50 minutes if, for example, I cannot hear the oven sound. So wherever you go, put it on your iPad, put it on your computer, and then you can go to another part of the house. So little things like that, you know, they're useful.

You know, there's— technology has helped us so much with how we cook. And, and making it easier for us in terms of shopping and in terms of timing and knowing when something's done. I mean, the thermometers for meat that you can use, uh, to tell you what temperature it's at, you're not even in the same room with it, so you can go get it out. But, you know, there's a lot of different techniques and, and apps available for your phones. iPhone has such— so many of them. My Android doesn't get as many, but iPhone definitely has a lot. And I may be going the way of the iPad Mini simply because of so many things are built for Apple and kind of getting tired of fighting the battle.

Yeah, and it's easy. It's easy in the kitchen too, you know, but, but I like one central place to put all the recipes, whether it's Evernote, whether it's this plantoeat.com, which is awesome. You know, then you have to go to 10 different websites where you collect 10 different categories of recipes. So that makes it easier.

And if anyone would like to come in, we have the seats open. Just request a seat. If you have any questions about baking or pies or anything food-related, we'll be happy to talk to you. And we're here for a few more minutes. If not, we're going to sign off in just a little bit. But had a lot of fun making pies, and now I have— I can smell them. You should smell the house.

Oh, they look so good. How long will you— how long will you cook, bake them for like 40, 50 minutes?

Yeah, you know, I do like to look at them. You know, there is basic time of like 40 to 50 minutes is usually where any pie will go. So you want to give it that and check it throughout. I do have all 3 in there, so opening and closing the oven those couple of times is going to change the time. Your ovens are all different. So a lot of times, you know, I'll use pies bake anywhere from 350 to 400 degrees depending upon what recipe. Most things bake in that range. I'll always err to the low side of it instead of the high side of it when I bake. I'll go 350, 360, somewhere in that range.

And I always ask you, so many of us have convection ovens and does it— is there an advantage for or against convection?

Yeah, it'll cut about 20 to 25% off the cooking time off of it. So the only, the only thing I ever found convection did not work well for with me was cookies, because cookies cook so fast, and sometimes I couldn't get that sweet spot between overcooking and just right because of the time. But for pies, they were great. I mean, especially in the work environment with our convection. Cakes, cakes, the only thing with the cake you have to watches, it doesn't like the ones that work were so powerful, they would blow the dough. So they said everything was cupcakes were always going one direction.

So yeah, yeah, no, that's not good. And A. Rounsfield mentions Pinterest, which is fantastic because you can have a board for every category of, you know, a food or meal or, you know, whatever. So Pinterest is great.

So check my website. Askchefdennis.com for recipes, and I have all these pie recipes there. I'll try and drop the link in again for you at the end, but all my— just search Thanksgiving pies or Thanksgiving and you'll see everything that I've made coming up to it. And you see the cranberry sauce recipe. I also have the other videos that we've done here on Blab. You can go through our replays and see all the great things that we've made and and all the tips Susan has given. So there's a lot of value in that as well. And follow us both, please. Susan, are you gonna be doing any more kitchen design or any interior design shows with Lori or?

There's nothing scheduled right yet. Thanks for asking. But you know what, we'll be talking about your kitchen very soon. I think maybe after Thanksgiving, we should, you know, we can put a little more time before the other holiday shows.

So I'm actually having the craftsman come over today to look at it, to tell him about what the changes we want. So he's going to—

good.

And then he's from New York, so he'll be back down in December sometime.

Yes, you said. Good, good, good.

So he's coming over. But yeah, I love the idea. The more I think about it, I love the idea of putting the oven in the corner.

Yeah, I developed it further yesterday and I think it would be a good idea.

Yeah, I'm just excited about about that because again, it opens up a whole other serving area for me when I do, because really, you know, you have, it's kind of cramped.

Yes.

You don't have enough area to really set out more food. And when I do parties, I like to use all my areas for buffet.

And just visualize if, you know, when you turn your back and you have this broad area for prep, I mean, you make everything from scratch and you, you know, are you the type, this is a Quick question, quick question. Are you the type who cleans as you go along, or do you make a disaster of your countertops and then clean later?

I clean as I go along. This, this is making me nervous because my sinks are full. And let me, let me just— oh, I turned that one off. Never mind. You're not gonna see. My sinks are all full, and generally I just— if I am looking at that, I guess it's my, some of my OCD or whatever that I have in terms of that, and I'll have to stop and clean.

And then I think you need a 30-inch sink. I think you need a big 30-inch sink.

Yeah, this two sinks is for the birds. Whoever thought of putting two small—

oh, that's the worst. That's to like torture people.

And I miss my deep sink, you know. I, I really— at first, the first time they put that deep sink in and I looked at it, I'm going, I could almost bathe in here. And then once I got used to it and I got these shallow sinks now. I'm like, oh man.

No, you need one 30-inch deep sink. That's what you're getting.

Good, good. I'm happy. So, well, thanks so much for coming by. This was Thanksgiving prep, and I had changed the title to Me Oh My How We Love Pie.

That was good.

Pumpkin pie, apple pecan and pumpkin pie.

They look, they look amazing. They look fantastic. It's easy. It's, you know, it's It's all about love with those pies. Looks great.

I'll take a picture and pop it on Instagram and Twitter. So if you follow me on either of those, you'll get to see the finished products later on. I'm anxious to see that apple one because I've never made a cutout pie like that before. So I'm anxious to see how it comes out. So, you know, you're learning with me some days. So if I can learn and do stuff without ever, ever doing it, you guys can do it too. So thanks for joining us around the kitchen table. Next week we'll be back on Tuesday and we're gonna brine a turkey. Wednesday at 12, we're going to roast a turkey. And then I'm coming back at 5 o'clock and we're going to carve a turkey. So, and Chef Dennis is gonna have all kinds of turkey in the house.

Oh yeah. Okay, bye everyone.

All right, we'll see you later. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.