Pie

This is a recipe that I first tried out a really long time ago for a friend in high school who had decided to become a vegan. A pie with tofu may sound odd, but silken tofu is very smooth when you blend it, and helps make vegan desserts rich and satisfying without dairy products. Although the texture is a little different than traditional pumpkin pie, the taste is almost exactly the same. The only way to make this better is to find vegan whipped cream to put on top.

Sweet potato pie is as southern as desserts come. Though it is a favorite in the soul food repertoire, you do not often see it on tables north of the Mason–Dixon line and west of the Mississippi. A traditional ending to Thanksgiving dinner, this silken pie is due for a nationwide comeback as a delicious finale to any fall or winter meal. I love to see an ingredient cross the preconceived boundaries of savory and sweet, and the naturally high sugar content in the potatoes makes its shift from dinner to dessert a seamless one. Yes, you could serve it with store-bought vanilla ice cream, but time dedicated to making your own rich ice cream studded with buttery clusters of cinnamon-spiced graham cracker crumbles is time well spent. Everyone at your table—Thanksgiving or anytime—will be glad you did.

Chocolate cream pie has a place of honor in roadside diner pie cases across the country. This deconstructed version inverts the classic format because the gorgeous, silky, deeply chocolaty pudding is worth digging for. Break though a crunchy, buttery graham cracker crust and a smooth layer of whipped cream before making your way to the rich chocolate depths of this decadent “pie.” Chocolate lovers, rejoice.

I’ve never forgotten the icebox pies I used to eat as a child at Luby’s Cafeteria. Those pies, along with the jewel-colored servings of Jell-O, were too tantalizing to resist. I always selected an icebox pie and a bowl of Jell-O, agonizing over which color to choose. I always finished the pie, but never touched the Jell-O. The Jell-O was for looks, the pie for flavor. My version of icebox pie is a stunning party animal—dramatic and devilishly rich. For parties, I prepare this recipe in stages: the crust one day, the filling the next, and the whipped cream topping the day of my party. A word of warning: These are large and very rich pies. Only under extreme circumstances do I recommend eating a whole one in a single sitting. (For example, you’re starring in a new movie and have been asked by your big-time director to gain fifty pounds pronto.) So you may wish to serve a half or quarter pie per person.

Imagine running through the tessellated shadows of the forest with a mustard jar of just-caught pollywogs and a sharpened stick for a spear, scrambling up the levee and lunging into culverts, your dog baying ahead in the distance. You slip on a wet log, stumble, catch yourself on the mossy shoulder of a boulder, oblivious to the mud and moist lichen flecking your arms. You are lean, quick, alert, leaping streams and plunging through dense brush. Lungs filled with the crisp air, perspiration on your back, eyes wild with happiness—you are free, alive, home. The old hound nuzzles up to your hand as you mount the porch steps, your mother’s greeting at the screen door, the aroma of cherry pie on the windowsill, your life a storybook distilled in the sweet mirth of salt.

If nut brittle is my muse, blondie pie is our love child. It is, to date, my favorite pie we’ve ever created. Dense, sweet, salty, nutty, chock-full of textures large and small, it’s perfect to grab a piece of on the go and crush as if it were a slice of pizza.

Nut crunch makes a great pie crust! I absolutely love this pie, but it doesn’t fit into the composed dessert realm of Ssäm Bar’s menu and it isn’t quick and easy to pack like Milk Bar pies need to be, so it never made it onto a menu. It’s a delicious recipe you’ll only find here.

This recipe makes two pies (two pies are always better than one), but you can always keep the second pie frozen if need be!

One of the earliest descriptions we got from our crack pie addicts was, “It’s like a pecan pie, without the pecans”—which I secretly hated. It’s so much more, and so much less. But one day we finally read between the lines and sarcastically, we thought, made a crack pie with pecans in the pie. It blew my mind a little. There aren’t too many boundaries in terms of the variations. So get crazy.

You must use a stand mixer with a paddle attachment to make this filling. It only takes a minute, but it makes all the difference in the homogenization and smooth, silky final product. I repeat: a hand whisk and a bowl or a granny hand mixer will not produce the same results. Also, keep the mixer on low speed through the entire mixing process. If you try to mix the filling on higher speed, you will incorporate too much air and your pie will not be dense and gooey—the essence of crack pie.

During many a week, candy bars make up 50 percent (or more) of my diet. As a teen, I already showed a predilection for staying hip to the culinary scene at the grocery store, trolling the aisles to check out interesting frozen items, new cereals, perhaps a vamped-up cookie section, and, of course, the impulse-buy area—one of my favorites—with its multitude of candy bars trying to break into the market. Which is why I was hooked on Take 5 candy bars long before I ever thought about making a pie inspired by them. I was blown away by my first bite of one, in the passenger seat of the family van in the Giant parking lot of NoVa. My sister had one cluster, and the other was all mine. It is the epitome of perfectly layered chocolate, peanuts, caramel, peanut butter, and pretzels. Hershey’s describes it as “a unique taste experience combining five favorite ingredients in one candy bar. The result is a delicious salty sweet snack unlike anything else.” Amazing. For my birthday a couple of years ago, Dave bought me two cases, that’s 480 clusters, of Take 5 candy bars and dared me to eat them all in a month. With a little help from my friends, I did it in twenty-eight days. On my birthday, that first day, I ate seven—and then puked the next morning (bad idea). Marian Mar made a big push to get this pie on the opening menu of Milk Bar, because, as she once put it, we are candy bars, and candy bars are us. So we need a candy bar pie on the menu. It’s a little bit of a bitch to make, which was my main argument for wanting to leave it off the menu. But working in this industry is a labor of love, after all, and Marian was right all along. This pie is one of our top sellers even today. We lovingly refer to it at Milk Bar as the T-5 pie.

When we first opened Milk Bar, at 4 or 5 o’clock every morning we would make fresh cinnamon buns with liquid cheesecake rolled up into the dough instead of applying cream cheese frosting on top. Cinnamon buns are something I feel very strongly about, since my mother started a tradition of making (not-so-great) ones for breakfast on every holiday. (Sorry, Mom, but you can’t give a kid a Cinnabon and then expect her to be OK with cinnamon buns made with margarine and skim milk!) We’d make them before the crack of dawn so they’d be ready for breakfast . . . and then we’d sell most of them to people on their way home at night, ready to tuck in with dessert and some TV. So we decided to get smart and create something that was delicious, available, and fresh at any hour, and didn’t have to be made to order every morning: the cinnamon bun pie.

Our grasshopper pie is like a brownie pie that got drunk on crème de menthe.

Making this pie shell is the perfect opportunity to use some of those disposable kitchen gloves we recommend (see page 23) to keep your hands from looking like a mechanic’s that just changed someone’s oil.