Pie is such a gift. My wife died nearly ten years ago and soon afterwards, I took up pie baking, which is something that she loved to do (I just loved to eat it — since childhood I've had a birthday pie instead of cake). I had all the stuff, after all. I got good at it and love to share them with friends at gatherings, or even just give them away entirely. Right before COVID, I did a Friday Pie Day thing where I gifted a pie to someone in town based on social media discussions. One time, someone got it for her coworkers who had just shipped a tough release.
When everyone got into baking early covid I couldn’t understand why no one was baking anything, like, good. No pizza or pie or cake or muffins or banana bread or even a damn focaccia. The world collectively just decided the end-all be-all of baking was… sourdough.
I do find it kind of wild how intimidating most people I know find baking. Get a food scale and follow the directions and you're good to go and will have something respectable and delicious. As with anything, you can dive deep and go extreme with it. But baking delicious food is not rocket science.
Sourdough is fantastic, I have two loaves finishing their overnight chill in my fridge right now, will bake them after dinner.
I was baking sourdough since before the pandemic, and will continue baking in the future. It's a bit of work, but it's not too much work and the results are pretty damn fantastic.
Focaccia though, if I baked that regularly I'd have to go back on a GLP-1. Focaccia taught me to read the seals on olive oil in the supermarket and actually pick the right one for the break.
It wasn't for no reason at all though. There were concerns about availability of yeast, which isn't used in sourdough. (Valid concerns or not, I have no idea.)
When I graduated from university, my dad had just died, my mom had cancer, and there was no employment for a year. I made a lot of pies and got really good at making crusts. Yep, it was always great when I brought in a real pie, homemade.
Yes, me too. Reading the caveat "– and she would give each pie away" made a lot more sense.
It's a social commitment at least as much as a creative/culinary one, and since there aren't a lot of people you'd want to give a pie minus a slice to, that keeps the extra calories under control.
There are some old 18th century pies they cooked in boiling water inside a bag which could be quite spherical. Townsends on youtube has some videos on it.
The first two things that spring to mind are pasties from the UK (which are not usually spherical but can get quite hemispherical), and the "UFO-Döner" from Germany (which are more oblate spheroids). Maybe by combining these ideas, your friend can get closer to their dream?
Well if you insert metal rods through it you can help with the heat transfer, then you can lattice over the holes. If you pumpkin pie it, you might even be able to have it hold up under its own weight. Plus a bit of stiff whipped cream in the holes would help.
I would make them fairly small (personal pie-sized) and use a filling that doesn't need to be cooked in the oven to set. The main limiting factors, I think, would be structural integrity and heating the filling to the center. You could set it on a ring (like the rim of a spring-form pan) to support it better during cooking. Now, a four dimensional hyper pie, on the other hand...
If you’re not cooking the filling, then do a teflon ballon that you put the crust on. Cook. Remove balloon. Then pipe in ready to ready to set chocolate cream.
I’m of the belief that doing just about anything every single day for a year will change your life! A key for me has been to “lower the bar” so that I can keep the promise to myself and maintain momentum through days of low energy or enthusiasm, e.g. playing the guitar for 1 minute, or writing 1 sentence.
a stranger i once talked to at the gym told me "every workout is better than the workout you are not doing" and that kinda changed my perspective on that topic.
Yeah I go bouldering even on off days to “stay in the rhythm”. And I do have honestly terrible days where I feel I’m struggling climbs of even a grade below my comfort level, but at least I went lol.
Yeah, doing a small thing daily can add up so fast.
When I started my niche-musueums.com website I bootstrapped it by posting a new museum I had been to every day for a month. It took 15-30 minutes a day and within a few weeks I had a site I was really proud of.
I think the key is to give yourself permission to stop without feeling guilty about it. Any time I start a new streak like this I deliberately tell myself that it's not going to be forever and I can stop any time for any reason.
Beautiful. I recently saw a youtube video [1] on radical neighboring that really inspired me. Led me to another book on the gift economy [2]. All which to say, I now always bake two loaves of bread. One I keep for the family, the other I give away.
I decided to make rotis every day for a month (am male of Indian origin who hadn't ever cooked breads), AND eat them. The first one was completely inedible. The 30th day's rotis were edible, but nothing like what women in my family make. But still, edible.
Eventually had the confidence to experiment with making Naan.
This led to experimenting with Asian-style Pot-Stickers.
The main benefit to me was confidence, and belief in pmarca's "you can just do things".
Why didn't you just ask the women in your family what they did to make them? It shouldn't take 30 attempts to get a basic flatbread recipe to be edible. It's not like all the women in your family devised recipes on their own - they just watched other women make them and learned how to do it that way.
This is like asking why someone built a text editor as a hobby project when Microsoft Word exists. There is value in experimentation and play, in trying to understand things from first principles. It would often be faster to just ask others, but if everyone did that, we would miss out on a lot of innovation.
If you're looking at it solely from perspective of "value" in experimentation and play, then that value mostly comes from expert level understanding of the ingredients and the process. To not ask for guidance from people right near you who know far more than you just seems like egotism.
Who has a better chance of developing an innovative omelette dish? Thomas Keller, or someone who can't make scrambled eggs without setting off the smoke alarm?
The point is, experts can bootstrap you so you can progress quicker than you can on your own. This is why mentors exist, and is the basis of Bloom's 2 sigma study.
It really depends on what your goal is. Some people just like "play." For example, I am terrible at video games--when somebody tells me that they "beat" a game, this usually seems unfathomable to me. The last video game I finished was Riven, back when Riven was new. I still do play now and then. I play Skyrim poorly. I like walking around and discovering things in the Skyrim world. If my goal had been to beat the game in some way, then I would be going about it terribly. But that's not my goal. It does not have to be because egotism.
In my experience, dealing with flour is an art, not a science. You just have to do it over, and over, and over, until you internalize the parameters and can adjust to them on the fly. The look, the feel, the temperature, the smell, etc.
Yes, and experts can guide you with feedback far quicker than you can perform these experiments and adjust the parameters on your own. This is exactly why mentors and apprenticeships exist.
I challenge each and every one of you to make a pie by the end of the month.
I made one, for the first time in my life, last week. It brought me tremendous joy not only to make it, but to have something nice to share with friends.
In case you did not actually nail perfect, flaky crust the first time, that's a fun parameter to try to optimize. I finally got it at some point, and when I did, I realized that all those old cookbooks that said things like "use little water" and "keep the dough cold"---all the tricks where I thought "that has to be a myth"---turned out to be essential. The Joy of Cooking is full of old wisdom like this that has taken me ages to appreciate.
My grandma made Platonically Ideal Pies, and I took up the art years ago. Mine, if I say so myself, are quite good, given that with Grandma's example I know what I'm shooting for.
I haven't made one for a few years, though - having a pie in my house is a recipe for me eating 5000 calories of pie and vanilla ice cream over the next few days.
When my grandma died a few years ago, I asked my aunts if I could have one of her pie pans. Apparently none of her other 17 grandkids thought to ask that - so I got all three (philistines!). Those basic metal pans are among my most cherished possessions.
I did this recently, and you know what I really loved about it? It's a great entry-level baking activity where the upside is that you have a pie (something you can gift or just eat!) and the downside is that you have a sort of cobbler.
You really can't !@#$ up a pie. Omelette is another good one. At worse you have scrambled eggs.
I mean, yes, at worse you burn your neighbourhood down and your dog runs away. But in terms of the more likely failure modes like screwing up the dough, breaking it, messing up how watery it is, etc. you can mostly just keep baking until it's done, mix it up, put into bowls, serve with ice cream, down the hatch.
Even broader, honestly. Make something culinary! It's amazing what the simple tactile experience of making something can bring when so much of our existence is doing things by proxy.
A fun hobby I picked up during Covid was trying to cook food from countries I had never been to - since traveling anywhere wasn't an option.
Pick a country, research what food it has that you've never tried, find a few online recipes and YouTube guides and give it a go.
This was a ton of fun. I have no idea if anything I cooked was even remotely like the authentic original, but it was still a very rewarding exercise.
If you live somewhere with a lot of international supermarkets (the SF Bay Area is great for those) it also gives you an excuse for a shopping adventure for ingredients.
Not to take anything from any other activity that someone embraces, but I imagine that for the majority of people in the developed world, taking a 1 hour walk every day would be the most "life changing" thing you could do.
Sure, but it's random and unrelated to the discussion at hand.
I bake pies but I also like mushrooms and grilled cheese sandwiches. Every other individual here has random associations they can make.
In person, this is seen as commandeering a linear discussion to your personal topic and repeated violations get you uninvited from conversations for being selfish.
On the internet we can just ignore a thread, which is what I should have done here but I've typed this far so I'll go ahead and post it.
The point of the pies was the connections it forced her to make with people in her life and then ultimately strangers. Finding 365 people to give pies to is probably harder than baking them all.
Taking a walk alone would be missing the main point.
These kinds of stories may seem silly to some (certainly it would seem silly to my past self), but I think these narratives of personal journeys are going to become more and more important to humanity as AI and automation take over most jobs.
The sarcastic individual in me saw the title and thought "heh, and you got diabetes?" But I was pleasantly surprised after reading it about how wholesome this was.
She is obviously a sweet lady that you would like to have as a neighbor. But I would not include garden variety pie in the wholesome category. The indulgence won't kill you, but it isn't healthy. Apples from her backyard tree are wholesome.
Baking everyday as a way to keep a professional identity is an interesting idea. Being semi-retired, I’ve noticed that I am starting to struggle the curiosity and motivation that kept me going when I still worked. This article makes me think I should pick up a habit of doing some “work” daily.
As someone who loves pie and has far fewer friends and family than the person this story is about, baking a pie every day for a year would also change my life.
If you just place the pie to cool on your window sill, the smell will cause some nearby hobos to float over, or so cartoons have lead me to believe. Then you'll have some friends.
Also neighbours tend to be very glad to receive free stuff :) I usually end up with way too many Basil plants every season and give them away, gotten to know some new neighbours that way!
I am hearing rumors that B2B sales is rebounding back to more in-person meetings. Cold emails don't work anymore. I've heard similar tales of current teens early-twenties that there is a trend of doing things in real life again. But... more likely if you start measuring it people are more reclusive than ever, and doing things that used to be normal is now considered "niche and trendy". Our sales process at least is very online-meeting oriented...
> Hardin Woods would bake [...] using fresh ingredients local to her home in Salem, Oregon
> She baked her first pie, a lemon meringue
> The next day Hardin Woods made a peach pie
> After that came a chocolate cream pie
Does lime, peach and chocolate ripen within the same season in Oregon? Vickie cooking for is community is already touching, this claim about freshness and locality is skimmed by people who are already convinced, spotted by those who disagree and raise critics of the skeptics.
Right, the location is off too! The ingredients probably aren't sourced in Oregon after moving to California, but anyway the season ("fresh") and location ("local") point stands. I guess she use local eggs.
It is something hard wired in our brains. Cooking, social connection, giving, all in one. We evolved to cook for each other. No wonder she is damn happy. Being 60 helps too.
Sweet potato pie is at least as good as a pumpkin pie if you've never tried it. If you're making filling from scratch, it's easier too. I learned not too long ago that the "pumpkin pie" my mom made every year was actually a sweet potato pie... that kind of blew my mind.
Is it just me or since The Guardian left twitter/X they've really been ramping up their paywalls/nagwalls? Love or hate X/Elon, that was really a dumb move on their part.