Thanksgiving! (part 1)

Let's start the Thanksgiving posts with dessert, shall we?

I don't bake pies very often, but in the past few years I've been making them for Thanksgiving. There's just something about Thanksgiving tradition (in general, not my family's) that makes me want to bake pies. The former tradition in my family was that we would have a number of relatives over, and someone would always bring Baker's Square pies for our dessert. When I was a kid we never had pies at home except at Thanksgiving, so oh, how I would look forward to those pies at Thanksgiving (I was partial to the French Silk). These days I'm still all for pie at Thanksgiving, but I've come to prefer the idea of a homemade pie. No one else in my family particularly cares, or at least cares enough to bake the pies themselves, so I take it upon myself to do the dessert baking. This year I made a pecan pie, apple tart, and apple cranberry crumble pie, for variety.

This Thanksgiving was my first time using glass pie plates for baking a pie, which upon doing some research I learned that a number of pie bakers prefer. But glass bakeware scares me. I read and take the warning instructions of things very seriously. Don't get it wet before putting it in the oven/after it comes out of the oven, don't put it in the oven moist, don't let the temperate change drastically and suddenly--these all are obviously helpful, practical points, but served to make me extremely paranoid and gave me visions of taking a pie out of the oven only to have the glass explode into tiny hot shards in my face. This has never happened to me and the sane part of me imagines that if anything, the glass would probably crack in pieces rather than explode into tiny shards and propel itself into my face, but the paranoid visions persist. I blame the combination of my overactive imagination and my fifth grade teacher, who once told my class about boiling water and glass, saying if you pour boiling water into a regular glass, it could explode. She did tell is that tempered glass, like in a Pyrex measuring cup, would be OK with that. Regardless, it was the vision that conjured in my 10 year old head of the glass breaking that's led me to never quite trust the combination of very hot water and glass.

I'm relieved to say that my pie plates emerged intact from the baking process. The pies themselves turned out well. The pecan pie crust ended up majorly slumping on one side and I'm not sure why. The last time I made a pecan pie I used a metal pie plate and that didn't happen. I put the pie plate with crust into the freezer at some point to firm it up before I baked it. When I took it out I realized that because of the drastic temperature difference thing I should not be putting it directly from the freezer to the oven, so I let it sit out for a while. Defeats the purpose, I know. Then of course there was condensation on my pie plate so I had to make sure to dry that off. In any case, I think that has something to do with the crust issues but the pie itself including the crust was quite good.

The next dessert was an apple tart with a crust that was much more like a more buttery pie crust than a puff pastry. It tasted pretty much like the puff pastry apple tart but with a crisper crust. Very simple, quite good, but not the most exciting. Maybe after all the ways I scared myself making the pies, using a safe old metal tart pan was just too anticlimactic.

Finally, I made a totally new recipe, which ended up being my favorite dessert. The holiday issue of Gourmet this year (RIP, even though I only got it thanks to my free subscription from Sur la Table) had a recipe for an apple cranberry crumble pie that looked so good--oozing red filling, crumbly bits on top, both tart and sweet fruit in the middle. I made a different crust than the recipe called for--an all butter rather than a butter and shortening crust. The best part is that this pie is not sickly sweet or overbearingly heavy, something I don't particularly want after one of my family's traditionally overwhelmingly bountiful Thanksgiving meals.