Pies, pies, pies! Pie season round up

This past October, I took a 2-day pie baking class at the San Francisco Baking Institute. I learned so much about baking pies! Completely changed the way I do it now. With Thanksigving and plenty of people to eat my pies, I took the opportunity to get in lots of practice. I made over 25 crusts and tried out a variety of filling recipes, perfecting my technique. Okay, it’s not perfect, but it’s much better than it was before I took and the class and even before all the practice. This post is mostly photos as the techniques would take forever to write down here and would be a sad shadow of taking the class which I highly recommend.

The class was 2 days and we made 5 pies and 4 rustic tarts (those are the little ones above). I seriously love these. They’re so fast and easy that they will definitely be a go-to for me if I’m going to a party. The ones we made in class were blueberry which is probably my least favorite pie flavor, but they were still pretty good.

I brought home the quiche and apple pie.

You can see I was still learning to do the crust properly (it gets better in later photos during Thanksgiving).

The crusts were nice and flaky. 

And the fillings weren’t runny.

We also made pumpkin pie, chocolate cream pie and a mixed berry pie (top photo), but I gave those to a friend who was taking another class because I don’t eat a lot of dairy and she lives with more people who would eat them. I did try the samples in class though and they were delicious.

While visiting the family for Thanksgiving, I practiced my pies. I made apple pies, cherry pies, pecan pies, quiches and 2 lemon meringues trying to get my custard to set. We found a calibration issue with my mom’s oven, but we fixed it. This is why we practice! You can see in the quiche above that early in the trip I was still working on my crust.

This pecan pie was delicious. I put more pecans in later ones, but I think I personally prefer it with slightly less pecans and more of the custard.

I made one of the cherry pies early to test out freezing.

And since we had extra filling, why not some rustic fruit tarts?

And here’s the pile of pie crusts I made for Thanksgiving.

Rolling out all those crusts was definitely a labor of love and I was actually sore the next day!

There were some tiny bits so I made rustic tart sizes, but actually ended up using those for some tiny pecan pies with leftover pecan filling.

I also pre-made some quiches (tomato/mushroom/mozzarella, red pepper/spinach/feta, and broccoli/cheddar) for Friday breakfast since we had a large crowd. I didn’t have a chance to grab a post-baking picture before they were scarfed up, but received many compliments on them.

And for the day before Thanksgiving, I made little individual key lime pies though these had a biscoff crust rather than traditional pie crust. So maybe that makes them tarts and not pies? Not sure.

Finally, here are all the pies I made for Thanksgiving: 2 apple pies, 2 pecan pies, 2 cherry pies, 2 pumpkin pies and 1 chocolate cream. Of course the chocolate cream — the one that I only made one of — was the most popular! Well, now I know for next year. Pecan was the next most popular.

And of course, you can see in the back in the mixing bowl that I made some homemade crème chantilly to go on top of it all!