ThePieous Takes a CHEWy bite out of the Big Apple
Posted on November 01 2016
I think I may have gone too far with the puns in that title...
Wait, what am I saying? You can NEVER go too far with puns! Onwards!
A bit before Halloween, I had the pleasure of appearing on ABC's popular daytime foodie show The CHEW. They did a lovely little plug for my blog, and then dug into a custom CHEW pie I made for the show. Here's a timelapse of me making the "test pie" at home a few days before:
And here's the clip of Clinton Kelly mildly burning himself on my pie ;) [minute 4:06]
I had a blast in New York (my first time there), and it was pretty surreal being up at 6am (3am my time) to peel apples and prep the two pies (a spare in case something happened to the first one) for the show.
Here's how I did it:
Time to create:
- 0.5 hours to create the stencil digital file, trace on acetate, and cut out shapes
- 0.5 hours to create the pie top design
- 0.5 hours to make the pie bottom
Ingredients:
- Roll out pie crust (or make your own!)
- Diced apples
- Organic peach jam
- Organic apple sauce
- Green and blue food colouring
- Vanilla
- Cinnamon
- Egg whites
Materials:
- 8" pie pan
- Image editing software such as Photoshop
- Food grade Acetate
- Sharpie pen
- Mat/Exacto Knife
- Sharp scissors
- Cutting mat
- Pastry brush
Step 1 - Sketch out the design
The CHEW wanted a fairly simple pie with just their logo centred, but to spiff it up a bit I went with a border of little circles and five vent holes at the top and bottom to represent the 5 hosts.
Step 2 - Create the stencil
Those of you familiar with my blog already know that I usually do my stencils in parchment paper - its is cheap, plentiful and very easy to cut. However! Since this design required finer detail than I usually have, I needed something a bit sturdier than parchment, which can curl a bit when it comes in contact with the egg white adhesive.
After tracing the logo, I carefully cut out the shapes that I wanted to show as cinnamon with a sharp blade.
Then I free-hand cut out tracings of both the skin and middle of the apple. These would be used to cut out the dough layers later.
I prepped the stencils and cutting guides at home, but there wasn't much else I could do in advance. The night before the show I hit the Whole Foods in the Columbus Circle and got all my ingredients. Then at 6am that morning I prepped two pies for that morning's show. Fortunately my hotel room had a little kitchen area or this would have been a lot more challenging! I painted the bottoms of the crusts with some peach jam to act as an additional sealant to keep the pies from sogging up before I could bring them to the studio's kitchen (and it's just yummy.)
Dicing the apples took a while, but I had a neat view of the sun rising over Manhattan as I chopped!
One down... getting lighter now.
I made two different sizes of stencil, to give the show the choice of how large they wanted the logo. Using an egg white wash, I glued the stencils down, then carefully sprinkled and patted cinnamon in place. Don't go overboard or it will fall on your pie as you lift the stencil off!
Phew! All done. I must have looked pretty funny tip-toeing down the street with two giant pie carriers. But I arrived at the studio without incident and was ushered back to the kitchen to give the baking instructions to the chef. The behind the scenes prep team was busy as a bee hive getting all the food perfect for the show. Very inspiring to see them in action!
During the show I sat at the tasting table and got to sample all the yummy food they created that day. The hosts were all very lovely to me and it was such a fun experience...
So that was my little whirlwind New York adventure! Would love to return some time (for more than 24 hours) - thanks to all the cast and crew of The CHEW who made it such a delightful trip!
Until the next post...
π > ∞
Jessica (aka @ThePieous)
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