Pie

These crumbs give all the flavor and none of the fuss of a traditional pie crust.

We fell so in love with the Ritz crunch that we decided to start recipe testing a few pie options using it as a crust. As we delved deeper into the world of pies, we became obsessed with both the concept and the technique of Ohio Shaker pie (a traditional Americana pie, where thinly sliced lemons are tenderized without heat in sugar and a little salt) and key lime pie (the South’s best use of sweetened condensed milk, which naturally thickens with the acidity of the key lime juice). We tried as many different citrus fruits as possible, thinly sliced and layered with sugar into a pie shell, or juiced and stirred into sweetened condensed milk. Grapefruit was the clear winner, and it turns out that combining the two pie methods made for our favorite recipe—though instead of thinly slicing the grapefruit and candying it, we make grapefruit threads so you get the same tangy grapefruit pop in every bite of pie. This recipe is a little more involved than others in this chapter, but it’s delicious and worth a few more minutes of your time.

One of the first fall desserts ever put on the menu at Ssäm Bar was a riff on the poor man’s pb & j: peanut butter, Concord grape jelly, and a saltine panna cotta (page 191). We loved the Ritz crunch crust so much that the following fall, we presented the pb & j in a more straightforward pie, showcasing Concord grapes in another light, with Ritz crust bringing the same salty, starchy component as the saltine panna cotta.

This was the template, the training-wheels version, for many tasty and elaborate frozen pies that came after it. It’s also the easiest, most crowd-pleasing dessert you can make in a jiffy with some cornflakes and mother recipes you have on hand in your kitchen. Decorate the pie with any fruit you like to put in your breakfast cereal (bananas! strawberries! blueberries!).

A deeper, darker, saltier version of the cereal milk ice cream pie—try this one for the salty but sweet fans.

One summer we had the idea of putting a frozen ice cream pie on the menu at Ssäm Bar. It would be sliced and stored in the freezer, so all the cooks had to do was get it on a plate, put some fruit on top of it, and—booya!—send it out to the table. Not a lot of work for the already-slammed savory cook. But that was during the time when we were operating out of a portion of the tiny, tiny basement at Ko, and there wasn’t any extra real estate for a professional ice cream machine. So we took a little time to think about how we could cheat the process a little—basically, we needed to get rid of the churning while freezing. We ended up finding that our sweet corn cereal milk was the milk that took to the task the best—the freeze-dried corn and Cap’n Crunch combo has this intense corn pudding flavor. It’s so tasty it can be diluted with a lot of fatty, bland cream and still pack a punch of corn flavor. The high proportion of cream, fortified with the starch from the cereal and corn, creates an “ice cream” that freezes soft but hard, a texture kind of like Häagen-Dazs. Because it gets loose and pourable as it defrosts, the “ice cream” is best for molded frozen uses, like this ice cream pie, or poured into, say, Popsicle molds to make ice cream pops. Once we had this crazy intense corn ice cream, we set to making a crust corny enough to match it. That process led us down the road to developing our corn cookie, which is the sleeper of all the Milk Bar cookies. It looks so harmless, so plain, so yellow, so un-cookie-like. It’s also my grandma’s favorite. Her house is surrounded by cornfields, so she’s my authority.

My grandmother Irene Paul taught me to make fried pies years ago. She made the pastry dough from scratch in the early days, but later in life she began to take advantage of modern conveniences. So here’s the recipe for Grandmother’s updated but old-fashioned fried pies.

A true Key lime pie should not be green!

This is an old family recipe. It really is a pie—as it bakes, it makes its own crust.

Lisa, our head chef and night kitchen manager, whips these pies up fresh daily for our guests in the restaurant. They go great with our homemade vanilla ice cream.