National Culinary Review

Since then, she has made the pie with peanut streusel and drizzled warm peanut butter over the top.

This deconstructed pecan pie at View allows the guest to put the pie together as he or she eats the maple-bourbon parfait, pecan brittle crunch, chocolate paint, applewood-smoked bacon gelato and stick of vanilla cotton candy.

element to balance out the apples. I use
lemon and orange zest in the crust to help
with this balance and the aromatics of the
pie. The edges are folded over the fruit,
instead of the traditional pie crust where
the fruit goes out to the edge.”
fruit before filling the pie crust. “This way,
I can get the water out before I cook the
pie, and can fit more fruit in the shell.”

HEALTHY PIES

Antonio Bachour, corporate executive pastry chef for KNR Restaurant Group, Miami Beach, Fla., chooses to keep seasonal and healthy pies—pastiera napoletana, basque, key lime, passion fruit and pine nut/honey—on the three restaurant menus he oversees (Quattro Gastronomia Italiana, Miami Beach and New York; W South Beach, Miami Beach; and Trump SoHo, New York).

She explains that the challenge in
making this pie is to ensure that all the
ingredients are tempered correctly and
the pie crust doesn’t get too chewy from
over-mixing. “You need to keep the butter
icy cold. And be sure the dough doesn’t
fall apart when rolling it out. It needs to
come straight from the fridge, be pliable
and have a good thickness.”
Noonan prepares a Concord grape pie
with peanut streusel in the fall ($7 per
slice). “I also do not need cornstarch,” she
says. “Instead, a little bit of flour provides
enough thickening power, and since
there’s a lot of pectin in the grape skins,
the pie thickens wonderfully with just the
ingredients in the recipe. You’re left with
a pie that is packed with fruit and has a
better texture than a mushy, gooey pie.”
“One of my favorites is the pasteria
napoletana pie ($10-$13, with a 17%
food cost), because the crust is very
crisp and the filling is very healthy—at
least, to a pastry chef,” Bachour says.
“To make the crust, we use butter, sugar,
flour and eggs. For the filling, we mix
ricotta and mascarpone cheeses, sugar,
cooked barley, milk, citrus and candied
fruits. Then the filling is poured into the
tart and cooked.

LESS GOO

Traditionally, pie fillings are thickened with
cornstarch. When the juice of the fruit
bakes out, it mixes with the cornstarch
and forms a goo. Antoinette Noonan,
pastry chef at Zé Café in New York, says
she prefers to have pie with more fruit
and less goo, so she partially cooks the
Noonan originally made the pie with
an almond streusel, but one of the
restaurant’s servers told her that when
there were leftover scraps in the pan after
cutting the whole pie, they would whip
out a jar of peanut butter and eat them
together. “The Concord flavor is so strong,
and when mixed with the peanut butter,
it tastes like a peanut butter and jelly
sandwich,” she says.