I’m reporting *live* from Washington, D.C. for a little pregame to my annual Thanksgiving pie marathon! As I write this, I’ve just baked off 50 pies for a lil’ corporate order. I’m covered in flour, got the old lower back pain coming in, and my feet definitely stink. Feels like Thanksgiving to me!
As I’ve written about in my last couple Sobremesas, this time of year is absolutely cray for bakeries. Our little baking team at Baked&Wired takes on hundreds of pie orders, and we stay up for at least 24 hrs straight baking them all - no cutting corners here, we do all of them in this amount of time so that they are supah fresh for your Thanksgiving. As you can probably imagine, when a group of people stay up for 24 hrs doing manual labor under very stressful circumstances,we all go a little batty (actually, make that even battier than you think, since in this case it’s FAMILY working together.)
me, my mom, and my sister-in-law in 2018
Over the years, I’ve learned some coping techniques to make this as smooooth as a process as possible.
Get McDonald’s Breakfast Drive Thru at 6am - I know, I know, some of you are like ew. This is honestly the one time a year I get McDonald’s. But I am telling you, there is something about getting that predictable breakfast sandwich with a side of greasy hash browns and a burn-your-tongue-off terrible coffee that really brings some peace and order to my day.
Prepare some baller playlists - I know I’m in for a roller coaster of emotions, so I make some playlists to reflect all of my manic moods. Excited! Energized! Happy! Hopeful! Anxious! Exhausted! Hopeless! Music can really nurture those stages. At about 1am, I inevitably get bored of my own music, so I hop on the Baked&Wired Instagram and start crowd sourcing song requests from fellow night owls. Won’t you join me this year?
Drink lots of water - this one is boring, but important! When you’re cranking out food like this with an impending deadline, you can forget to hydrate. We’re constantly yelling at each other to drink more water. Otherwise someone is bound to get HIRSTY (thirsty version of hangry). We don’t want this.
Prepare your rider - pretend you’re a celebrity for a night and compile a list of snack essentials (except then you gotta get your ass to the store yourself and since you are certainly not Taylor Swift and ain’t nobody gonna get this shit for you). My snack list is : frozen pizza, ranch dressing, almonds, Monster Energy drinks, and peanut M&Ms. As you can see, I also treat this time of year as my Rumsprina and eat whatever the hell I want. I deserve it, okay!
Check yourself before you wreck yourself - while it’s tempting to cause a tantrum when you forget to, say, add salt to a large batch of dough, forcing you to throw out dozens of pies in the middle of the night (true story!) you must accept that this is inevitable. When this happens, I suggest stepping into a walk-in fridge to scream a few times and then consult steps #2-#4 above. Listening to a good Aretha Franklin song or eating a frozen pizza with save you and bring you back to Planet Earth. And on Planet Earth, we must laugh about how silly it was you forgot salt. And then laugh extra hard that you had to go in to a refrigerated box to scream about it. On Planet Earth we remember, it’s just pie, after all, and you go make those pies again! You can sleep when you’re dead!
Celebrate! - Staying up all night doing anything is worth celebrating. You defeated the day! I like to celebrate my last pie in the oven with a celebratory twerk on the bakery wall and a tequila sunrise.
Damn, I gotta say, it feels good to be back. When I’m making this many pies, at a certain point I just go into a meditative state. Maybe this is why people knit?? In this xtra techy world we live in now, it feels so good to step away from my computer and phone, get my hands in some dough, and let my mind wander a bit (not too much though or you end up missing the salt!) Also, it feels like it means something, like it matters, even though it’s so small. These pies are helping Thanksgiving feel as normal as it possibly can in 2020. Even if you’re without your extended fam, even if it’s over Zoom - I know that at least you’ll have pie. And that makes me happy.
So, to get you ready for you Thanksgiving, I’m finally going to share my pie recipe. As I mentioned in the last few Sobremesas, pie dough is tricky tricky but it really is what makes a fantastic pie. While it’s super simple ingredients, it’s all about the technique. I warmed you up last week with the galette, and now we’re going dial it up for the real deal. Tune in to my Instagram Stories to see some videos!
I’m just going to drop the pie dough recipe + technique here, and you can fill it with any pie filling you like (remember, the pie filling is the easy part!)
Best Pie Dough
Ingredients
1-1/2 cups flour (you can do 50/50 all purpose and wholewheat- note that more whole wheat flour will require less water)
1/2 cup butter, a bit cold but not quite room temperature
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/3 cup + 1 tablespoons of cold water
Let’s goooo!
Dough time! Check out my Instagram Story highlights to see some video tutorials if my words aren’t making sense. Remember, you just gotta get your hands in the dough and feel it out.
Whisk the flour and salt together in a medium bowl. Cut your stick of butter into chunks and add to the flour mixture (remember, butter should be cold, but not rock hard either). Pick up handfuls of the butter / flour in both hands, and in a squeezing motion, mush together and then work off your fingers back into the bowl. Repeat this motion over and over again until the dough makes little pea shaped balls and there are no “dusty” flour bits left. You don’t want to overwork this though.
Add ice cold water, sprinkling over dough mixture. Start with a little less than 1/3 cup (if you’re using whole wheat flour), adding up to 1/3 cup + 2 tablespoons if the dough feels too dry still. Feel it out. If you accidentally add to much water and it feels super wet, don’t worry! Just add some more flour to balance it out.
Lightly toss until it starts to come together. You do not want to work with the mixture much. Then form into a ball.
Rest a damp cold towel / paper towel over the dough ball in the bowl and put it in the fridge for 10 mins to rest.
Take a pie cloth or a piece of parchment paper lightly dusted in flour and put it on a flat surface.
Take your dough ball out of the fridge.
Flatten it out with your hands as much as you can so it’s in a nice and even pancake.
Place on the parchment paper and with a rolling pin (or a full wine bottle works too!) Roll out the dough - you want to keep this as perfect a circle as possible. My trick is to first roll up-and down (12 o’clock to 6 o’clock) and then do a few rolls side-to-side (3 o’clock to 9 o’clock). Then you can roll out in-between to balance out the circle. Take your hands and feel around under the dough so that you can ensure it’s all the same thickness. You want to roll it out until its about 2 inches wider than your pie plate.
Place the dough on a 9” pyrex pie plate. Push the dough into the bottom and where the walls are lightly so you can ensure the dough is sticking to the plate.
Now to make this pretty….
Take the overhanging dough and start to roll it up like a little burrito (will also note these are the same finger muscles one uses in rolling a joint - if you have more experience in that than burrito rolling!). Nestle your burrito directly on top of the lip of the pie plate. Work your way around the rim of the pie plate.
Now take both hands and practice squeezing your forefinger and your thumb together like a crab. Place your fingers 1 inch apart and grab the burrito dough, and literally pinch and squeeze the dough together. Work your way around the rim of the plate.
Cute!
There you go. Add whatever filling floats your boat and bake it off! Or message me for filling recs.
Thanksgiving is weird this year, but I highly suggest making a pie to make it feel less weird.
Happy Baking, love ya mucho.
Tessa
p.s. send me some song recs for my 250 pie bakeoff next week pls?bonus points if it makes me twerk.
Great tutorial...now to get psyched for next week!!! Remember to have fun...