Pies, Pies, And More Pies

Pies were the theme of our class today and man-alive were there a lot of pies made. Our team made chocolate walnut pie, plum ginger galette and an apple cranberry pie --I have not tasted them yet, not really a big pie girl, but they smell and look delicious.

I've never been a person who bakes pies but with the dough that we made today, a sour cream dough, I could probably get on board with pies. The dough was very easy to make and rolled very smoothly and easily. Though our chef said that it wasn't a very forgiving dough in terms of patching and being able to reuse scraps, I found that those shortcoming were not a problem because the dough was very soft and supple and easy to roll out. Pretty soon strawberries will make an appearance at the farmer's market and I just may use this dough to make a strawberry pie that I will be sure to share with y'all.


Apple Cranberry Pie with Sour Cream Crust -- sorry I couldn't get a better photo

We used the sour cream dough for the apple cranberry pie but we used a different dough, galette dough, for the galettes -- duh. Galettes are a pies that are even more free form than the typical pies. You don't use a dish to form them and just place the filling (in our case it was a plums that we had roasted for about 15 minutes with ginger, sugar, lemon, and a little rum...) into the center of the rolled out circle and fold the dough in to make little round bundles. What makes galettes so pretty is the exposed filling in the center because it gives you just a little pop of color and texture.


Ready to roast plums


Finished galette


Close up of the beautiful filling

We also made the chocolate walnut pie that was made in a way that is similar to the way you make pecan pie. If you buy your pecan pie and have no idea what I'm talking about, you basically bring sugar and dark corn syrup to a boil then add butter to cool the mixture and stir it into a few whisked up eggs and then pour everything into a pie shell that has pecans scattered in it -- pretty easy actually though not as easy as making a trip to the store to pick one up... The chocolate walnut smells like a very tasty variation and just required switching out the nuts and adding a couple ounces of chocolate to the syrup mixture when the butter was added.


Chocolate Walnut Pie

Tomorrow I'm sure that we will be doing something fun with doughs though I'm not sure what -- stay tuned for more dough excitement!