You, too, can make a pie. These classes will show you how.
Berry Tarts and Galettes
11 a.m. – 2 p.m., Tuesday, November 12. Viking Cooking School, 1745 Peachtree Street NW, Atlanta.
$59 per person. Register at http://www.vikingrange.com/consumer/cookingschool/classes/class_detail.jsp?prodId=prod12730298&id=cat12790028 or 404-746-9064.
Hands on class.
This class concentrates on tarts and galettes, open faced desserts with flavorful crusts. You’ll learn to make a Linzer Tart with a Hazelnut Crust, Jumble Berry Clafouti, Blackberry and Almond Tart and Blueberry and Nectarine Galette with a Cornmeal Crust. You’ll receive a bonus recipe for Almond Pate Sucree. Snacks and beverages served.
You’ll go home with: recipes and a box full of everything you made (unless you eat it all in class).
Fall Pies and Tarts
9:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m., Saturday, November 16. Salud Cooking School at Harry’s, 1180 Upper Hembree Road, Roswell.
$55 per person. Register at http://www.wholefoods.com/salud or call 770-442-3354 extension 2.
Hands on class.
You’ll concentrate on making a great pie crust then prepare a Pumpkin Streusel Tart, Pear and Cranberry Mini-Pies, Apple Galette with Caramel Sauce and Chocolate Pecan Pie. Lunch is served.
You’ll go home with: recipes and a mini pie to share at home.
Southern Pies for the Holidays
10:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m., Saturday, November 16. Cook’s Warehouse, 180 W. Ponce de Leon Avenue, Decatur.
Register by calling 800-499-0996.
Hands on class.
This class explores pie crusts and fillings. You’ll learn to make lattice tops, double and fluted crusts and pie dough decorations.
You’ll go home with: recipes and a pie.
Take and Bake Pies
11 a.m. - 1 p.m., Tuesday, November 26. Sur la Table, Phipps Plaza, 3500 Peachtree Road, Atlanta.
$85 per person. Register at http://www.surlatable.com/sku/1349943/Take+%26+Bake+Pies+*Giveaway*or 800-243-0852.
Hands on class.
Learn to make pastry dough and two classic Thanksgiving pies: Dark Chocolate Pecan Pie and Spiced Pumpkin Pie. Assemble the pies in class, then take them home to bake and serve for Thanksgiving.
You’ll go home with: recipes and a pie in your own white Sur la Table ceramic pie dish.
Lucia Nasuti Smeal’s Pecan-Cranberry Pie
Hands on: 15 minutes
Total time: 1 hour, 15 minutes plus resting time for crust
Serves: 8
A few tips from Smeal for this pie: “This is a never-fail traditional pecan pie recipe with the festive addition of cranberries to cut the sweetness and give it some color. Be sure to use fresh pecans from this season. You can tell they are fresh if they are light-colored. Pecans darken with age. Buy them fresh and freeze them for later use. And be sure to use plain, not flavored, vegetable shortening.”
If you have scraps after preparing the crust, roll them out again and cut into shapes with cookie cutters. Bake these and put them on top of the pie for an extra decorative touch. Autumn leaf shapes would be pretty with this pie.
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for rolling
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup vegetable shortening
4 tablespoons ice water, more if needed
3 eggs
1 cup light corn syrup
1 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons salted butter, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups chopped pecans
1/4 cup fresh cranberries
Sift flour and salt together into a large bowl. Add shortening and using a pastry blender or two knives, cut shortening into flour mixture until mixture is crumbly and no piece of shortening is larger than a pea. Add small amounts of ice water and mix in with a fork. Continue adding ice water until mixture just begins to form a ball.
Flour hands and lightly knead dough to form a mass. Wrap dough in waxed paper or plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour up to 2 days.
When ready to bake, remove dough from refrigerator and put on lightly floured working surface. Roll out to a circle approximately 12 inches in diameter and 1/8-inch thick. Transfer dough to a 9-inch pie pan, letting crust drape over sides of pan. Trim crust so there’s 1-inch overhanging the pie pan. Fold overhang under so crust just extends to the edge of the pie pan. Finish the edge with alternating thumb pinches, with a fork, or by cutting small shapes from remaining dough and pressing along the rim of the pie. Refrigerate crust while you prepare the filling.
In a medium bowl, lightly beat eggs, then whisk in corn syrup, sugar, butter and vanilla. When well blended, stir in pecans and cranberries. Pour into prepared crust and use a fork to distribute cranberries and pecans evenly. Cut 2-inch wide strips of foil and lightly cover the rim of the pie crust. Bake pie 1 hour, then remove foil strips and cook 5 minutes more or until pie has risen in the center and looks springy. Remove from oven and allow to cool before serving.
Adapted from a recipe provided by Lucia Nasuti Smeal.
Per serving: 593 calories (percent of calories from fat, 45), 6 grams protein, 78 grams carbohydrates, 2 grams fiber, 30 grams fat (9 grams saturated), 87 milligrams cholesterol, 277 milligrams sodium.
You, too, can make a pie. These classes will show you how.
Berry Tarts and Galettes
11 a.m. - 2 p.m., Tuesday, November 12. Viking Cooking School, 1745 Peachtree Street NW, Atlanta.
$59 per person. Register at http://www.vikingrange.com/consumer/cookingschool/classes/class_detail.jsp?prodId=prod12730298&id=cat12790028 or 404-746-9064.
Hands on class.
This class concentrates on tarts and galettes, open faced desserts with flavorful crusts. You’ll learn to make a Linzer Tart with a Hazelnut Crust, Jumble Berry Clafouti, Blackberry and Almond Tart and Blueberry and Nectarine Galette with a Cornmeal Crust. You’ll receive a bonus recipe for Almond Pate Sucree. Snacks and beverages served.
You’ll go home with: recipes and a box full of everything you made (unless you eat it all in class).
Fall Pies and Tarts
9:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m., Saturday, November 16. Salud Cooking School at Harry’s, 1180 Upper Hembree Road, Roswell.
$55 per person. Register at http://www.wholefoods.com/salud or call 770-442-3354 extension 2.
Hands on class.
You’ll concentrate on making a great pie crust then prepare a Pumpkin Streusel Tart, Pear and Cranberry Mini-Pies, Apple Galette with Caramel Sauce and Chocolate Pecan Pie. Lunch is served.
You’ll go home with: recipes and a mini pie to share at home.
Southern Pies for the Holidays
10:30 a.m. - 1:30 p.m., Saturday, November 16. Cook’s Warehouse, 180 W. Ponce de Leon Avenue, Decatur.
Register by calling 800-499-0996.
Hands on class.
This class explores pie crusts and fillings. You’ll learn to make lattice tops, double and fluted crusts and pie dough decorations.
You’ll go home with: recipes and a pie.
Take and Bake Pies
11 a.m. - 1 p.m., Tuesday, November 26. Sur la Table, Phipps Plaza, 3500 Peachtree Road, Atlanta.
$85 per person. Register at http://www.surlatable.com/sku/1349943/Take+%26+Bake+Pies+*Giveaway*or 800-243-0852.
Hands on class.
Learn to make pastry dough and two classic Thanksgiving pies: Dark Chocolate Pecan Pie and Spiced Pumpkin Pie. Assemble the pies in class, then take them home to bake and serve for Thanksgiving.
You’ll go home with: recipes and a pie in your own white Sur la Table ceramic pie dish.
If it’s November, it must be time for pie. Pumpkin pie, pecan pie, apple pie, sweet potato pie — people are expecting pie on your holiday table. Your head is swirling with the possibilities, and you’re pretty certain you’re not up to the task. Pop a store bought pie into the oven and pass it off as your own? Or is this the year you’ll master pie baking once and for all?
Meet Lucia Nasuti Smeal. By profession, she’s an attorney and professor in the School of Accounting at Georgia State University. By avocation, she’s an award-winning pie (and jelly) maker with a rack full of blue and purple ribbons to show for it.
A trip to the Ohio State Fair almost 30 years ago was the impetus for her prize-winning ways. Smeal was smitten by the beautiful pies and jars of preserves. In the mid 1990s, she entered her red plum jelly in the Cherokee County Fair and won a blue ribbon. “It inspired me to do more. The next year, I won a blue ribbon for my muscadine pie. I boiled the seeded muscadines in sugar water, and they ended up tasting like raisins. From then on, I began regularly entering county and state fairs,” she said.
Smeal says she began concentrating on pies because they were easy to put together in the midst of a full-time working schedule, and they have a larger margin for error than cakes. She credits her award-winning success largely to her insistence that her pies look homemade but have just a little extra touch like streusel combined with a lattice topping or cinnamon sugar sprinkled on little separately baked cut-outs that decorate the top of a custard pie.
And she never compromises on the filling. “I give you permission to even use a store bought crust from the dairy case, but you should never cut corners with your filling. Pit your own cherries, bake a fresh pumpkin for your pie– those extra steps allow you to use farm fresh ingredients and your pies are just better,” she said.
There’s no dearth of classes for those who want hands on instruction. Shannon Marsh, of Salud Cooking School in Roswell, finds when the weather gets cooler and holidays approach, pies and tarts are just the kind of homemade rustic dessert people are craving. But it’s the crust that stops them. “They’re afraid they won’t handle it properly or that they’ll underbake it or overbake it. Finding that perfect crust is what a lot of our students come for,” she said.
Charlotte Terrell of Roswell is a baker who had never made a pie. “My mother made pies. But, by the time she was teaching me to bake, she had moved on to frozen pie crusts. I really wanted to learn to make a crust,” she said. After her class at Salud Cooking School, she now makes almost a dozen pies a year with the help of her husband, David, who has taken on the job of rolling out the crusts.
“We always have Thanksgiving with my sister, and we’ll be taking pecan and coconut custard pies. And our crusts will have those nice flaky layers you just don’t get with store bought crusts,” said Terrell.
Analia Serebrenik, of Viking Cooking School in Buckhead, says people enjoy pie baking classes because it gives them a chance to learn skills under the eye of an instructor. Her students are looking for a pie crust that works for them and a filling that’s flavorful and has a good consistency.
“Those are the things that are intimidating about pies. A class helps our students feel confident when they’re entertaining. For those who already bake pies, a class can give them some new recipes,” said Serebrenik.
Marcia Bryson of Smyrna baked her first pie in a Viking Cooking School class. “I decided with the holidays coming up I wanted to make everyone a pie. I would never have believed it, but making the crust is really so easy,” she said. She learned to make crusts by hand and with a food processor.
“When I tried to make a pie before, it never got as far as the oven. I’d just toss the whole thing. But the instructor showed me how to fix my mistakes. I learned to just jump in there and get it done,” said Bryson.
Have we convinced you to put a homemade pie on the table for Thanksgiving? Smeal offers a few tips to make it as painless as possible.
Bake your pies a day or two before. Cool them, then cover and refrigerate. No need to crowd the oven with pie baking when there’s a turkey to roast.
The crust can be made several days before you plan to bake and left in the refrigerator until you’re ready to put together the filling and bake.
If you’re taking your pie to someone else’s holiday meal, copy Smeal’s strategy. She frequents thrift stores during the year and buys glass pie pans that are in good shape. Now she can bake a pie and make both the pie and the pan her gift.
Since you can’t please everybody, make at least two pies – choosing from nuts, fruit and custard pies.
Make your own crust, but if you just can’t, use a pie crust from the dairy case. Make that your shortcut, not the filling. Then take a few minutes to put your own decorative touches on the pie. That’s what people will notice.
Follow a good recipe. It will have the right proportions for the filling. But don’t be afraid to add new ingredients like a little lemon in a sweet pie, or something colorful like a few berries in a pecan pie.
What pies will Smeal be baking this Thanksgiving? “Everybody in my family wants a different one. I limit them to two. What I don’t make for Thanksgiving, I’ll make for Christmas. Our go-to pies are buttermilk pie, pecan-cranberry pie, fresh pumpkin pie and a strawberry pie for my son who just can’t give up his summer pies,” she said.
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