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| Pie: 300 Tried-and-True Recipes for Delicious Homemade Pie | 
 enlarge | Author: Ken Haedrich
Brand: HARVARD COMMON PRESS
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
Buy New: $16.71
You Save: $11.24 (40%)
New (25) Used (10) from $11.96
Avg. Customer Rating:  26 reviews
Sales Rank: 5905
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 608
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 7.9 x 1.9
MPN: 52495
ISBN: 155832254X
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.8652
EAN: 9781558322547
ASIN: 155832254X
Publication Date: September 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Easy As Pie February 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Finding a great pie anywhere is extremely difficult. In fact, it is rare that I would even ask for pie as a dessert choice because they are usually not very good. However, my hankering for pie reached a frenzy after watching the movie "Waitress".
For those unfamiliar with that movie, its main character explains her feelings through coming up with creative pies. When the movie's credits began, my longing for pie took hold of me. I was convinced, after many attempts, that there was no really great pie out there, so I decided to make my own.
After a great deal of research, I found this book. It is really outstanding. The writing is fun and easy to read. It is well organized and takes the stress out of baking a pie for a first timer like me. Ken makes it seem so simple that during the past month I have made over 20 pies, ranging from fruit to nut to cream pies. I took a class about baking pies, but it did not hold a candle to Ken's book.
Those twenty pies have mostly been baked for other people. The joy a fresh baked pie gives to someone makes me feel like I am making a difference. People love getting homemade pies, so much so it almost brings them to tears. My husband's co-workers, people at the gym, employees at stores that I frequent, and neighbors have been the beneficiaries of most of them. The reviews have been outstanding! People have said that they are they best pies they've ever eaten. At first I thought they were just being nice, but those platitudes have come from non-pie lovers and even the most finicky eaters. People are so excited about getting pies that I just can't stop making them!
I would like to say that the best place to get a great pie is my house. However, that sounds a little conceited and is not one hundred percent true. The truth is, if you want to have a great pie make one of your own using "Pie: 300 Tried and True Recipes for Delicious Home Made Pie". You will not be disappointed. The only problem is that you might not be able to eat pie at a restaurant again. On the bright side, you will always have something great to bring to a potluck, cook out or give as a gift. Pie really is the best desert out there. It combines all the best of creativity, complexity, and bakery goodness.
Is it time to pity the pie? I think not. It is time to make pie! So "pie it forward"
 lovely book December 6, 2007
"Pie" is a perfectly lovely book. The section on crust is outstanding; however, the 5 pie recipes I have tried so far are good, but not quite fabulous. Yes, I followed the directons to the letter and own a bakery, so I do know pies.
THis book is perfect for beginners and for long-time pie bakers November 18, 2007
This is not going to be a long review, I'm just going to get to the point. This book is pretty amazing, I've been baking pies ever since I checked it out from the library (and renewed it) for about 2 months now. This is the book to get if you want to bake a pie.
Here are a few pies form this book I really recommend making:
~Caramel Apple Pecan Pie (I made this one 4 times, people love it.)
~Diane's Pumpkin Praline Pie (my first, it was awesome!)
~Sweet Cottage Cheese Pie With Plump Raisins (This is really good for breakfast!)
Happy Baking :)
Fabulous September 23, 2007
A really terrific mix of pie recipes -- and all the ones I've tried have been fabulous including the Double Cherry, Apple (one of the 10+ options) and Key Lime (mmmm, mmmm, good!).
Buy it for recipe collection to supplement book on technique. August 28, 2006
30 out of 33 found this review helpful
`Pie' by culinary journalist and editor, Ken Haedrich is an imposing tome of 639 pages that the author freely admits is the largest single book on this subject. And, in my experience, he is probably right, although Rose Levy Beranbaum's `The Pie and Pastry Bible' weighs in at 692 pages, although it is not exclusively about the classic American sweet pie with its characteristic 9 or 9 inch diameter and sloping sides, which distinguishes it from the French tart.
While sheer size alone suggests this book has a lot going for it, the contents confirm that this is a serious reference of recipes and techniques for that great American dessert. Unfortunately, this may still not be the very best text you can get on making good pies. There are three major reasons for that opinion.
First, the aforementioned `Bible' and Susan Purdy's `As Easy as Pie' are both superior texts for presenting good illustrated techniques for how to deal with all the ins and outs of making that elusive tender and flaky piecrust. Haedrich has very few diagrams to illustrate his techniques. The only one I saw was a series of diagrams for assembling a lattice top crust which you commonly see on cherry pies. Other techniques such as pastry cutouts may have been decorated with a single drawing, but hardly a full illumination of the subject. This is doubly irksome as Haedrich's basic technique for transferring the rolled pastry to the inside of the pie plate is not the most common method. In fact, I find his recommended method just as prone to mishaps as the three other methods I have seen or read about.
Second, I really didn't find his coverage of pie pastry methods to be as complete as what we have in the two other references I cite. Unlike Beranbaum and Purdy, Haedrich is just a bit too connected to a particular technique for each task. He even goes so far as to `debunk' some methods such as the technique of rolling pastry dough out between two pieces of plastic. Now it just so happens that based on a demonstration done by my hero, Alton Brown, on an episode of Good Eats, I actually used this method, using a disassembled freezer storage bag for the plastic, and I am happy to say it worked like a charm. Since it was very easy to flip the pastry over and reflour its surface now and again, I was able to roll it out to a very decent circle with no mishaps. And, I had no problems transferring it to the pie dish using the fold in half method. Beranbaum and Purdy tend to give us a range of possibilities, and let us pick the method that works best for us. I find it especially odd that Haedrich doesn't include a description of the classic French technique for working butter into pastry, which Purdy covers to excellent effect.
Third, for a book this big dedicated exclusively to pies, I would have expected it to cover all the standards, then move on to variations. Oddly, I discovered that almost every `classic' pie recipe I looked for was missing from this book. I looked for a standard peach pie recipe and found only some variations which used some expensive ingredients I was not prepared to buy (I stuck with my old favorite from Purdy's book). I looked for a classic mince pie recipe and only found a Mincemeat - Green Tomato pie. This is not a very practical recipe for Thanksgiving and Christmas, when we are most inclined to make a mincemeat pie. (Purdy comes through again with a great method for jazzing up jarred mincemeat preparations.) I could also find no references to `tarts' at all, even to the classic Tarte Tatin (French Apple Pie). I suspect the Tarte Tatin is probably covered in the author's Apple Pie book.
All this means this book is not quite the DEFINITIVE volume it hopes to be, but that doesn't mean it is not a very good book to have if you happen to really like baking pies. I highly recommend it as a second book after you have Susan Purdy's excellent and inexpensive trade paperback `As Easy as Pie' (There are some other Purdy pie books which are really abridgments of the larger book. Try to get the original.) If you can't find Purdy's book, Nick Malgieri's `Perfect Pastry', also in paperback, is a great manual for basic techniques, especially since his techniques are illustrated with photographs, if that works better for you. While Barenbaum's book is, in many ways, the best of the lot, it tends to be oriented to professional baking methods, and it spends a lot of time explaining the whys and wherefores behind the techniques.
Haedrich has two important things going for him. First, the book is a very easy read. You will enjoy yourself wandering through his opinions on pies and pie making techniques, even if you rely more heavily on other texts. Second, this is a huge collection of PIE recipes. If you have no interest whatsoever of venturing into the world of tarts, galettes, or some other fancy European pastry, this book will keep you occupied for years, as long as you have at least one good reference like Purdy for the standards. It is also nicely priced, being about $6 less (or even less if you get the paperback), list price, than Beranbaum's similarly sized volume (although Beranbaum's Bibles are worth every penny for the serious baker).
A very good source for pie recipes overall.
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