Sonoma County makers share 3 pie recipes perfect for Pi Day
If my high school geometry teacher, Peggy Kubicek, had told me that one day I would joyfully celebrate Pi, I would have thought she was being irrational. (Warning: math puns ahead). But if she’d told me there would also be pie at this celebration, then I would have been all in, because any excuse for pie is a good one, even when math is involved.
This was in 1987, back when Pi was still merely a symbol for 3.14 and its infinite stream of trailing numbers used to solve the area and circumference of circles, spheres, and other curved shapes.
That all changed on March 14, 1988, when Larry Shaw, staff physicist at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, put his math where his mouth was, and launched a movement to make geometry more fun with Pi Day. Like all good celebrations, food played a central role as Larry and his wife, Catherine, set up a table filled with fruit pies and tea for the inaugural festivities.
So, the Pi Day-pie connection is something that came together organically; it’s not just a holiday co-opted by chain diners and pizza restaurants to cash in on a good idea. (Interestingly, National Pie Day, which happens on January 23, with no math involved, was started by a nuclear engineer and beer brewer from Boulder, Colorado because it was his birthday and he liked pie.)
In 2009, in an effort to give math education a boost, the normally diametrically opposed members of Congress exhibited a rare moment of bipartisanship and officially declared March 14 Pi Day by a vote of 391-10. In case you’re wondering who on earth would vote against Pi Day, one of those dissenting was former Vice President Mike Pence, then a Representative from Indiana, which even has a state pie-- sugar cream pie, also known as Hoosier Pie. The mind boggles.
So, with Pi Day upon us, we set out to find pie recipes that are a bit out of the ordinary. Pies that circumvent the typical double-crust, fruit-filled paradigm; pies that can do double duty as breakfast, lunch or dinner, or that are unusual enough to be worthy of celebrating a holiday of such quirky origins.
Ursule Amiot, who owns Zweibel’s Bakery with partner Karl Gergel, believes the recent uptick of interest in Pi Day has more to do with food than anything else.
“People just want to eat round things, they don’t care about math,” said Amiot.
Amiot makes a vegetable-packed quiche using seasonal, local produce that the couple sells at local farmers’ markets along many other baked goods, some round some not.
Although it doesn’t bear the word ‘pie’ in its name, quiche, she says, with its crust and custard based filling, should certainly feel right at home on the table for Pi Day.
“In my mind quiche is a fully rounded meal, it has everything you need,” she said, noting that it works as a meal any time of day. “I eat it for breakfast all the time. That would be my ideal Pi Day. Start with... quiche and then continue on to eat pie for the rest of the day and not feel bad about it.”
Amiot does use some mild math when assembling her quiche. The custard that she pours in to fill the empty space that remains after loading up the whole grain crust with layers of vegetables is one-third parts each of eggs, whole milk and heavy cream, which she says makes for a very rich quiche.
Like quiche, shepherd’s pie and cottage pie, are an opportunity to put a square meal on the table while served in something round, or oval, as the case may be, like the ones served at Goose and Fern in Santa Rosa.
Owner Clyde Hartwell hails from a village just north of Birmingham in the United Kingdom where savory pies are much more common than in the U.S. Hartwell and his wife Brittany explained pies from bakeries tend to have a sturdy bottom crust with a puff pastry top, while pubs and restaurants serve them in baking dishes topped with either pastry or with a mashed potato top, which is how Goose & Fern does it.
The Railroad Square pub’s Beef and Guiness Pie combines tender chunks of chuck roast and mushrooms in a Guiness-spiked gravy tucked beneath a crust of mashed potatoes, making it a good meal for both Pi Day and St. Patrick’s Day.
“God forbid somebody does lumpy mashed potatoes,” said Brittany Hartwell who got the recipe just before the couple moved back to the U.S. from the chef at the Swan Inn, a 400-year-old pub where she worked. She whips the mashed potatoes with an egg then runs the pie under a broiler to ensure the top is golden and crusty.
“It’s an easy way of feeding your family in one pop. You don’t have to worry about making pastry,” said Clyde. His wife continued, “It’s a fun way to feed a crowd that can feel fancier than it is.”
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