She’s My Cherry Pie - Lisa Ludwinski Trancript
Kerry Diamond:
Hi everyone. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe and I'm your host, Kerry Diamond. Each week we feature interviews with the coolest culinary personalities around. Today we are launching a special mini series just in time for all your holiday baking. It's called, She's My Cherry Pie. Today and for the next five Saturdays host Jessie Sheehan will talk to some of the best bakers around and do a deep dive into one of their signature bakes. Jessie is the perfect person to take us on this journey. She's a recipe developer, TikTok baker, and the author of three cookbooks. Icebox Cakes, The Vintage Baker and her latest, Snackable Bakes: 100 Easy-Peasy Recipes for Exceptionally Scrumptious Sweets and Treats. Stay tuned for my chat with Jessie and Jessie's first guest, Lisa Ludwinski. The Baking Pro behind Sister Pie, the celebrated bakery in Detroit. If you are making pies this holiday season, you don't want to miss their talk because Jessie and Lisa chat all things pie dough so you can make the perfect pie crust at home.
Today's slice of She's My Cherry Pie is presented by California Prunes. I'm so excited to tell you more about California Prunes because they are going to become your new pantry essential. First off, they're an amazing healthy snack. When you're in between meals and don't want something too carby or sugary, California prunes are perfect. They contain dietary fiber plus nutrients to support good gut health, potassium to support heart health, and vitamin K, copper and other antioxidants to support healthy bones. I often toss a bag of prunes in my tote so I don't wind up mindlessly snacking or hangry when I'm running around the city or in the recording studio all day. California prunes are a great resource when baking as well. You can reduce the amount of sugar or oil in a recipe by swapping in prunes or prune puree. And prunes are terrific on a cheese or charcuterie board. If you want something delicious and flavorful to compliment any rich ingredients you'll be swooning over prunes in no time. For recipes, more health benefits and to meet some of the growers, visit californiaprunes.org and be sure to look for California Prunes at your favorite supermarket or specialty shop.
The new issue of Cherry Bombe is here. Cherry Bombe publishes a beautiful print magazine and our latest issue is all about heart and hospitality. Our cover star is Erin French, the inspiring founder and chef of The Lost Kitchen in Freedom, Maine. Read all about Erin, check out a few of her recipes and learn about other incredible folks making a difference in the food world. You can order Cherry Bombe from our website, cherrybombe.com, or you can find an issue at cool culinary bookstores like Book Larder in Seattle, Omnivore Books in San Francisco, and Bold Fork Books in Washington D.C. Now let's chat with Jessie Sheehan.
Jessie Sheehan, welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe.
Jessie Sheehan:
Thank you for having me, Kerry.
Kerry Diamond:
We have been talking about this project for so darn long. I remember sitting outside ... What was the restaurant?
Jessie Sheehan:
Fort Defiance.
Kerry Diamond:
Fort Defiance. And it was early in the pandemic and we were sitting outside because people still didn't go-
Jessie Sheehan:
We didn't go inside and we hadn't even been vaccinated. It was really early.
Kerry Diamond:
Right. You didn't go inside if you didn't have to. And we were sitting outside and it was sunny and we were happy to see each other.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my gosh.
Kerry Diamond:
And we talked about this idea for a podcast and you were like, "I'm all in." And here we are.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
All good things take time.
Jessie Sheehan:
100%.
Kerry Diamond:
Even your cookie dough as you're going to learn.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
As much fun as it is to make that cookie dough and eat it and shove it right in the oven, it's better if you put it in the fridge and let it rest a little.
Jessie Sheehan:
A great, great analogy. So true. This podcast is all the better because we waited and rested.
Kerry Diamond:
Exactly. I want the listeners to know a little bit about you and why you are the perfect person to host She's My Cherry Pie. And I should apologize for my voice a little bit. I just cannot shake this laryngitis and I'm going to hide out and stop talking soon but not today. We're going to find out a little bit more about Jessie. How did baking become your thing?
Jessie Sheehan:
It's a funny story in the sense that although I have always had a voracious sweet tooth, I was not one of those peeps who has the storyline. Their personal narrative is, "Oh, I was at my mother's apron strings or my grandmother's apron. My first word was whisk and then I said sugar." That was not me. But I've always loved, loved, loved to eat sweets. I just wasn't interested in making them.
Kerry Diamond:
So you didn't bake as a kid?
Jessie Sheehan:
Not at all. We ate only packaged sweets. I had one grandmother who liked to bake. When I would go visit her I would have ... But I was never like, "Grandma can I get in the kitchen with you?" Not remotely interested. It was weird. I was an actress out of college and then I was-
Kerry Diamond:
You have to tell us, what kind of acting were you doing?
Jessie Sheehan:
I started when I was little. I was in fourth grade when I was in a kids theater company in Boston where I grew up and-
Kerry Diamond:
You were like little Orphan Annie?
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
The sun will come out tomorrow.
Jessie Sheehan:
100%. Minus the singing because I can't sing. But yes, I was Charlotte in Charlotte's Web. But anyway, really into acting when I was little. Studied it. Continued to do it in high school. I actually spent my first year of college at NYU's [New York University] Tisch School studying acting and then transferred to Barnard and ended up getting a degree in history but was still very interested in acting. Graduated college. Did a lot of off, off, maybe even off ... Maybe three Offs Broadway plays.
Kerry Diamond:
Were you in The Fantastics?
Jessie Sheehan:
No. But I remember seeing The Fantastics with my family. Or Sheer Madness. Do you remember that one?
Kerry Diamond:
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. S-H-E-E-R.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
What was the goal?
Jessie Sheehan:
I thought I wanted to be in movies. Honestly Kerry, I just wanted to make a living being an actress. You'd get on an airplane and people would say, "What do you do?" And this I think was back when people talked on airplanes. I'm not sure people do this anymore, but back in the day people would ask you what you did and I would say, "I'm an actress." And they would giggle uproariously and say, "Oh what restaurant?" The joke being that of course I must not be earning a living doing this. Of course, I must be working in a restaurant. Which was true, I was. Sitting here in a studio makes me want to mention this. I also loved doing voice overs to make money. And so I did have a little tiny voiceover career. It was one of those classic things where right when things you've been working on for a really long time are finally coming to fruition is also right when you've reached your boiling point and it's time to move on. So it was like right when I decided, you know what, I'm going to go to law school. Was also right when I got my first voiceover agent and things started to pick up for me in terms of doing commercial work and making money in that way.
Kerry Diamond:
Do you have any acting aspirations anymore?
Jessie Sheehan:
No. But I won't lie. One aspect of this whole thing ... I'm a cookbook writer, I'm a recipe developer. One part of it that I really love is being on TV. Not only do I love having been able to be on The Today Show when I was promoting and still am promoting Snackable Bakes, but I also ... Because that's a feather in your cap and it helps sell books. But I actually really love it, Kerry. I love the makeup. I love the hair. Although I have to say post pandemic, nobody's really doing makeup and hair anymore, which is really sad because I really do love that part. But I just love the whole thing. I love seeing the camera men and women, I love the set. I love the moving tables and this and the that and seeing the celebrity hosts. So I really love TV.
Kerry Diamond:
So you go to law school, you become a lawyer. I'm not going to lie, I for the life of me can't see you as a lawyer.
Jessie Sheehan:
Honey, I literally ... I loved school because I'm a nerd. School was great. I clerked for a judge. Loved again. It's very school like. You're doing a lot of writing. And then practicing. I was like, what am I doing? Every single case I got, I wanted to settle. I hate fighting. To this day I hate ... I don't know what I was thinking.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. So you're lawyering, if that's a word, and you decide that you want to start baking. So you show up on the doorstep or the back door of one of your local bakeries.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yep. I was pregnant with my first son and although I loved being with my kids and I love, love, love my kids, I needed to be doing something else as well. And I think it was just a friend who said like, "Well you like eating sweets. Go learn to make them." I literally went into my neighborhood bakery, Baked, for those that know it, and begged and pleaded via a little scrawled note, "I'm a mom but I want to learn to bake. Do you want to have me in? You don't even have to pay me. I just want to learn." They-
Kerry Diamond:
I live down the block.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, exactly. They literally thought I was insane. No one called me. Who is this freak? What is this note? There were 20 exclamation points Kerry. I was so excited. No one wrote me back. But I've always been like ... I persevere. So I went back. Much more chill, no exclamation points and my voice, there was no writing happening so it was just very chill. And I apologized for the note and said, "I know I was a little enthusiastic, but seriously I'll be a hard worker and I just want to learn." And they took a chance. In the beginning, literally I was the vacuum sealer of the granola bags, which I was horrible at. So I'm not sure why they didn't fire me immediately, but they weren't paying me so maybe that's why. But I couldn't even use a vacuum sealer. But slowly over time I went from vacuum sealing granola to packaging loaf cakes and teacakes and plastic wrap before freezing them. And then they taught me how to make the cookies and the loaf cakes. They have an amazing thing, Kerry, I love so much. It's called the PBK bar. The bottom is a peanut butter flavored rice crispy treat and the top is a chocolate peanut butter ganache. Kerry. Oh my God.
Kerry Diamond:
How did I never try that? I used to walk down ... I live close to Red Hook and would walk down all the time. I would always get the cupcakes.
Jessie Sheehan:
The cupcakes are so ... Well, another thing, just shout out to Baked. They have the kind of cupcake ... You and I both have a deep love of buttercream frosting. So just for listeners, this is just the way it is. Kerry and I love buttercream.
Kerry Diamond:
Team buttercream.
Jessie Sheehan:
100%. But the thing about what I love about Baked is it's equal amounts of frosting to cake. It's generous. I am not about that little tiny smear of frosting. Not that the cake is dry, but you need a lot of frosting. They deliver on that front. And then slowly but surely, I proved myself that I kind of knew what I was doing and I got crazy, crazy lucky in the sense that the guys who owned the bakery started writing cookbooks. So I didn't have an inkling that I would be interested in doing that even though that is basically now what I do. But they needed somebody who kind of knew what they were doing in the kitchen, but not so much that she would ... Essentially, they were asking me to be their recipe tester. And I needed to know a little bit about making things in the kitchen, but not so much that I was not going to realize what was missing from the recipe because I was just fixing it as I went.
And I started testing recipes for them in their first book. And I think by the second book they were having me develop recipes and I just got into this whole world of cookbooks, which I cannot tell you how much I love still to this day. It's like nothing ... People are like, "Why do you want to do that?" You don't make any money. It's brutal. But I love it so much Kerry. I really do love to write, whether it's the headnote or the introduction or the recipe itself. And I love the kind of ... I don't know. Intellectual makes me sound a little highfalutin, but it seems more ... It's a different kind of using of the brain than what I normally do and I just love it so much.
Kerry Diamond:
Snackable Bakes is your newest book. Tell us what Snackable Bakes is all about.
Jessie Sheehan:
So a snackable bake is basically a treat. Doesn't have to be baked but it's a treat, a sweet in this particular book that is assembled in 20 minutes or less, has a super short ingredient list and really simple, easy to follow instructions. I get a little eyes roll back in the head, agita, et cetera when I'm looking at one of those recipes that starts and then you have to turn the page and you have to turn the page again. The anxiety level. I get a little hot. It's not good. So I wanted to write a book in which on one page you're looking at your ... Well basically the entire recipe is on one page and then the other page is a photograph. Because that's the other thing that's special about this book and important to me is that people can visualize everything they're going to make. Because I know for myself and I know from other books I've written that didn't have a photograph for a particular recipe, it's hard for people to make things that they can't see.
Kerry Diamond:
I love when there's a picture for everything.
Jessie Sheehan:
Me too. Me too.
Kerry Diamond:
You have so many great recipes in that. I will say my favorite is one of the no bake ones. The large format peanut butter cup.
Jessie Sheehan:
That one is epic.
Kerry Diamond:
Where'd that come from?
Jessie Sheehan:
It basically comes from my absolute deepest of deep loves for Reese's Peanut butter cups. I just won't lie.
Kerry Diamond:
Same.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love my children but I really love a Reese's Peanut butter cup.
Kerry Diamond:
Do you have to put it in the freezer first?
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my gosh. So good in the freezer. Well I get a little upset because sometimes I'm trying to save them and they do get... Don't you think they get a little melter faster than most candy?
Kerry Diamond:
I never noticed because I put mine in the freezer.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. So good.
Kerry Diamond:
I need that chocolate to have just that right snap.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love the snap. I love the snap.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's talk about this show. So the show is called She's My Cherry Pie. So it's going to be a mini-series for the next six weeks and thank you to everyone who's tuning in. I'm so excited about this. I was happy you liked the name. Some of you might remember the song from a long time ago. But there was this hair metal band. I think it was Warrant or something. I don't remember. So it was a song that came out in 1990 and every time the video came on MTV, I was just like, oh god, this is so sexist and awful. So when we were trying to come up with names for the podcast that popped in my head and I was like, oh, I want to reclaim She's My Cherry Pie.
Jessie Sheehan:
So great.
Kerry Diamond:
So that's what the name is about in case you're wondering where the name came from. But you talked to six really incredible bakers. Is there anything you think all these women have in common?
Jessie Sheehan:
Everyone has said this, but I think there is something deeply meditative and soothing and all of those words when people are in the kitchen with their hands in dough or even cookie dough, using your hands to knead in your chocolate chips. I feel like everyone feels some connection to what they're doing in this very hand, eye ... Both of those things needing to be there. I thought of one other thing that's been really interesting. With She's My Cherry Pie we go deep on a recipe and really talk to people about all the different elements of a recipe. I know why I love recipes because I'm a nerd and I love to know, but why baking soda? And how about an egg yolk? And it's such a treat to talk to these women and realize they're just like me. They've nerded out on it too when they were developing the recipe in the first place and why they put it in and they want to talk about that and share where it came from. So it's just also really cool to just realize how obsessive we all are about all these little pieces that come together to make the cookie the way it is or the pie dough or the biscuit.
Kerry Diamond:
Well Jessie, I can't wait for everybody to get to hear you and your first guest.
Jessie Sheehan:
I can't wait either. Thanks so much, Kerry.
Kerry Diamond:
Thank you. You're the Bombe, Jessie. You really are.
Jessie Sheehan:
Thanks Kerry. You're my cherry pie.
Okay. Get your notebooks out because it's time to talk dough. Lisa Ludwinski, hello.
Lisa Ludwinski:
Hi.
Jessie Sheehan:
So excited to be here with you today. First I want you to tell us about your path. How baking became your thing. You definitely need to tell the peeps about your food videos honey from way back. You've started the movement. Now that's what everybody does. Kitchen videos.
Lisa Ludwinski:
I was doing theater in college and moved to New York to pursue that. I wanted to be a director, which wasn't the easiest thing to try and just figure out as a 22 year old also trying to figure out how to live in New York. So I got distracted by food. It was around the same time when food blogs were becoming really popular. Like Smitten Kitchen had just started. This was back in 2006, 2007. And so I spent every moment when I wasn't working one of three jobs just looking at food blogs and wishing that I was making things. And so I thought I could combine my interest and passion for theater and film and performance with my new curiosity for cooking and baking. And I started filming a show called Funny Side Up on YouTube. Every week I would make a new recipe that I had never made before and it would be the first time I was trying it so it was very much lighthearted. And many mistakes were made, but that was part of the charm I think. So I did that for about 100 episodes.
And after that and lots of hijinks, I decided that I wanted to try and get my feet wet in the professional side of things. And so that's when I worked at Milk Bar. I worked there for two years. I worked behind the counter, I worked at several of their locations and then I ended up spending most of my time at their Brooklyn commissary being a baker. And that was super cool to not only be able to learn a lot about baking on a larger scale, but to also be witness to a young business and its growth and the decisions that they were making about its growth. And then I also worked for a summer at Four & Twenty Blackbirds. And that was actually right before I moved to Michigan because in 2010 or '11 I did an internship in Detroit at Avalon International Breads and Zingerman's Bake House learning about bread making and also learning about businesses with triple bottom line missions. People that are focused on people, planet and profit in their business vision.
Fast forward two years, I moved back to Michigan and started Sister Pie out of my parents' kitchen in November of 2012. And after a year of doing that, I actually started baking out of a commercial kitchen in Detroit, which is actually in the building that I'm in right now.
Jessie Sheehan:
Amazing.
Lisa Ludwinski:
Which is so weird.
Jessie Sheehan:
Full circle.
Lisa Ludwinski:
Yeah. This recording studio I think opened in the past couple of years here, which is so cool. And so coming into this building was a little walk down memory lane.
Jessie Sheehan:
I want to do a deep dive into Sister Pie's all butter pie dough recipe. And I feel like this is absolutely perfect because Thanksgiving is almost upon us and peeps might be thinking about switching up their pie dough recipe this year or maybe they just don't have a go-to pie dough recipe and they need one. In your book you write, "Our basic pie dough is a pure and simple ode to unsalted butter and all purpose flour." And I love that because it's simple for the win. So I want to go through the ingredients you use, the tools you like, the assembly so peeps can just understand all about this recipe. So first things first, I want to go through the ingredients. Now I know it's all purpose flour. Wondering if there was an R&D period of time where you were trying pastry flour or some of the other flours that people are throwing into pie or if it's you've always been an all purpose gal.
Lisa Ludwinski:
I've always been an all purpose gal for the pie dough but I would say that especially early on, and you'll see it in some of the recipes in the cookbook and even some of the things we do now, I was actually always very interested in combining all purpose flour with another flower like whole wheat or rye or buckwheat. But for the basic recipe, I just stuck with all purpose. And that was probably just because I didn't really have experience with pastry flour or anything. So it was like if it's not broke, don't fix it.
Jessie Sheehan:
100% agree with that. Tell people about what kind of butter you like and why.
Lisa Ludwinski:
Yeah. We use European style butter. We actually use ... Yeah. Plugra is the brand that we prefer. European style just means it has a higher butter fat percentage, which for something like pie dough is super important because the butter is really the only thing you're tasting. And so more fat equals more flavor and that's why we use European style butter in all of our recipes. So yeah. Plugra is what we use. P-L-U-G-R-A. You can also find other European styles. There's Kerrygold and we've used that before and that has a really delicious taste as well. Some other brands have developed their own European style as well.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then sugar. You use just a tiny bit in the recipe. And I wonder, can you tell peeps what sugar does to a pie dough recipe?
Lisa Ludwinski:
The sugar and the salt are really what I consider to be the seasoning in the pie dough. So it just brings a hint of sweetness and a hint of... Well the salt is more balancing but yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Nice. And then now the genius piece of the Sister Pie pie dough recipe, your genius liquid. Usually when you have a pie dough recipe, you're going to have flour, you're going to have butter, maybe you're going to have a little bit of sugar, you're going to have salt and then you're going to have some kind of liquid. And often it's a cold liquid. Sometimes it has a little vodka, sometimes it has a little vinegar. But Lisa has a really cool way of setting up that liquid for you and what you should be looking for. Because it's hard. Peeps probably know from trying to make pie dough, getting cold water into your pie dough ... Anyway, there are lots of pitfalls and Lisa has a really cool way of getting that liquid together. Could you walk us through it?
Lisa Ludwinski:
I can. Yeah. This is another moment where I can't take credit for this very cool trick. It was something that I learned at Four & Twenty Blackbirds because when you're making pie dough in bulk, you have to have a lot of cold water. And so at Four & Twenty Blackbirds they would take a measuring cup, a liquid measuring cup, a steel one, and they would fill it up with a little bit of water and then freeze it. And then once it came time to make the pie dough you would take out the cup, fill it with water and then add some apple cider vinegar. And so I learned that fully from Four & Blackbirds. And it was such a genius trick because you wouldn't have the ice cubes falling into the bowl. It was much easier to measure it. You could be sure that the water would be cold. Whereas when I used to do it, I would make the ice cup of water when I needed it and so it was pointless. The ice didn't actually chill the water.
So that was something that I think ... When we teach the pie classes, I say that it's helpful to freeze the water that way so that you have the solid ice chunk to chill it. It's not super necessary. I think it's especially helpful when you're making a lot of pie dough which maybe you'd be doing if you're preparing for a big holiday or an event. And so I like to use that technique at home as well. And then the apple cider vinegar, I think that's something that's really gotten passed down from baker to baker to baker over the years. And originally people said that it would inhibit the gluten formation in the dough, which would lead to a flakier, more tender crust. When I was researching for the cookbook, I wanted to have a quote or something about that and I couldn't really find any true pie science behind it. But what I like about the apple cider vinegar is that it gives a tangy flavor to the crust that just elevates it a little bit. Other than that, it's just a fun pie tradition that we keep on doing. But I really think it's about the flavor for me now that I know that. And if it's helping our dough be flakier, great. But I think that the most important elements to flakiness come from other things.
Jessie Sheehan:
And I think tools are a different story because people like to have all different kinds of tools or maybe they use their hands or they use a food processor when they make pie dough. So I love hearing about, and I think you guys will too, about what Lisa likes to use. So first of all, your bowl. I'm always using a big glass Pyrex and I love that you guys are all about stainless steel or stainless for keeping things cold.
Lisa Ludwinski:
It helps to keep things cold for sure. But it also can take a lot of abuse. So when we're cutting the butter into the flour, we're first using a bench scraper and then we're using a pastry blender. And you want to slice through the butter with both of those tools to the bottom of the bowl so you can make sure that every action you're doing is creating a change in the ingredients. So that you're actually slicing through that butter. And so what ends up happening is you're hitting the bowl and making a lot of noise. I'd be a little nervous doing that with a glass bowl. So the stainless steel, like I said, can really handle it. And so for that reason and the fact that it helps keep things cold, we really enjoy the stainless steel bowl.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then a pastry blender, which I don't even know if I have, I'm embarrassed to say. Can you talk to us first about a brand if people wanted to pick one up? And then again, is it just to avoid the hot hands situation? What's so great about a pastry blender? It seems old school and grandmothery in the best way.
Lisa Ludwinski:
So our process is that we first start with the butter. Cube it with the bench scraper in the bowl and coat it in flour and then use the bench scraper for a little bit longer while rotating the bowl to continue to break down the butter. So at this point you're taking the cubes that you've just cut and maybe slicing them in half with the bench scraper. Because if we switched to the pastry blender too soon, the butter would get stuck because it would still be too big. But then we switched to the pastry blender and they've usually got about four to five blades. And you can utilize this rocking motion. And so it really covers a lot of ground when you're trying to make pie dough efficiently because you can rock the pastry blender back and forth and you're slicing through several pieces of butter at once and you just continuously do that all around the bowl, mixing up the ingredients until you're ready to add the liquid.
I like it because it definitely avoids your fingers touching the butter and it does a good job of getting the butter to the texture within the flour that we want it to be before adding the liquid, which is basically large chunks of butter that are about the size of peas and pistachios and then everything else looks like a finely grated Parmesan cheese.
Jessie Sheehan:
Right. I love that.
Lisa Ludwinski:
And in terms of a brand... Yeah. It's fun to think about peas and cheese. I wish I had some pasta every time I talk about that.
Jessie Sheehan:
Well it's also fun to picture my... I'm very old, so my 1970s childhood with the green can of Kraft Parmesan.
Lisa Ludwinski:
Yeah. Exactly.
Jessie Sheehan:
That is exactly what you're talking about.
Lisa Ludwinski:
That's exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah. I ate a lot of that as a child. For brands, I think Good Grips OXO has a good one that I like. It's wider. I like it when they have the grippiness on the handle because otherwise I feel like my hand slips a little bit. That would be the one I would recommend off the top of my head.
Jessie Sheehan:
Awesome. Thank you. And then tapered rolling pin. Talk to us about why tapered as opposed to old school handled rolling pin.
Lisa Ludwinski:
Yeah. I've worked with several different rolling pins in my day. I think my favorite two have been ... Well Four & Twenty Blackbirds had one marble rolling pin that we sometimes used and that was so cool because it did the work for you and it stayed really cold and it was really heavy. So it was great at rolling out a really cold piece of dough. But having multiple marble rolling pins isn't really in a bakery budget. We use the tapered end French style, which I actually prefer over anything with handles because I'm actually touching the same tool that's touching the dough. Whereas with the handles I feel disconnected from what's happening. I can't really tell if it needs to be rolled out more or less or how thick or thin it is. But with the French style, I'm really close to the dough. I feel super connected to it.
And then the tapered end really helps because ... I guess the rolling pin itself is super light. And then when you go to roll the edges you can use the tapered end of it. Rest it on the table and be really thoughtful about how much you're rolling out the edges at the beginning so that you can then focus on rolling out from the center for the bulk of the rollout and then at the end go back and even it all out. Because I think what people run into a lot is that because the edges will warm up more quickly and become more malleable, people might over roll the edges and then you don't have enough dough to crimp. And that's of course a huge part of the pie is the crimp.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now we need, pun intended, our hands held as you walk us through the assembly. So the first thing that I love, and you already talked about it a little bit when we were going through the tools, but I think peeps need to know. We're talking about a steel or a metal bowl. It's got some dry ingredients in it and then you're putting a literal stick of cold butter in there. No cubing outside of the bowl. That is so amazing. And I know we talked about the bench scraper, but will you just go through that again? Literally cold butter stick in bowl. Love.
Lisa Ludwinski:
Yeah. Really it's just about efficiency. We're going to cut the butter either outside of the bowl or inside the bowl. We might as well just cut it inside the bowl and get it coated in flour as we're doing it. And I think with pie dough, for me at least, every moment that the butter is outside of the fridge is a moment not to be wasted because ... I will step to the side for a second and just say that the reason that we don't want the butter to melt is because we want those chunks of butter to stay intact and not become homogenous with the rest of the ingredients. So that when we put a crust into the oven, it's got these little chunks of butter that are going to burst in the oven when they hit the heat and that's going to create these flaky layers. So that's why we're obsessed with keeping things cold just as a side note. But going back to the assembly, we just put the cold butter straight from the fridge in the bowl, coat it in flour and then cube it. So if it's a stick, I would quarter it lengthwise and then cut across half inch cubes and then break it up with your hands and coat it in flour before switching back to the bench scraper to cut it up further.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then from there you move to pastry blender to get cheese and peas as it were.
Lisa Ludwinski:
Yep. And so after I've used the bench scraper to cut the butter more and really get it incorporated with the flour, I'll switch to the pastry blender. And I like to rotate the bowl, just spin it as I do this. It just helps me because then I can point my pastry blender just at the center of the bowl. I don't have to think too much about what I'm doing. I can go on autopilot and then every five or six turns of the bowl I'll pause, quickly clean out the pastry blender and then mix the ingredients up with the pastry blender and continue until I've gotten to peas and cheese.
Jessie Sheehan:
Great. Great. And peas and cheese is when you know it's time for your cold liquid.
Lisa Ludwinski:
Yeah. And I guess I'll... I'm moving into this pea pistachio cheese situation where I want there to be a little bit room for some bigger chunks.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love.
Lisa Ludwinski
So that sounds like a great pasta. Peas, pistachio and cheese. I would love to eat that. Anyway.
Jessie Sheehan:
I'm coming to Detroit to visit you and we're going to make that pasta together.
Lisa Ludwinski:
Okay. So then once you've gotten to that point, you will add the liquid and then I like to go back to the bench scraper, big surprise, to just move the ingredients around until you don't see visible pools of the liquid anymore. So just a little bit. You're just going to hydrate the ingredients. And then you're going to go in with your hands and that's when you're really going to bring the dough together. And you're basically just scooping up as many of the ingredients as you can from the bottom of the bowl, pressing them back onto themselves, turning the bowl and just repeating that folding process over and over again until you have a dough.
Jessie Sheehan:
And you'll do that in the bowl. Some people, once it's hydrated, they drop that onto a floured work surface and begin to knead that way. But you're bowl until the end.
Lisa Ludwinski:
I like the bowl because it gives me something to work against it. It's easier to keep track of all those little bits of flour and butter that are flying everywhere. And what I'll do is ... Right away you'll start to feel a dough being formed but also at the same time there's all of this flour and butter at the bottom of the bowl. So as I'm going, I might also try to scoop that up, give it a squeeze and then incorporate it into the dough. And you really are. You're right. It does feel like you're kneading it. But the difference that I see is that we're not kneading it at this point because we're just bringing it together. If we were to continue to fold it after all of the ingredients are incorporated and it's a solid dough, then that's when we would be working the dough too much. So for a lot of people when they see me make the dough, they think I'm overworking it, but it's really that I'm just kneading to bring the ingredients together so that they're one mass of dough and then at that point that's when I stick it in the fridge.
Jessie Sheehan:
Right. And talk to us about your wrapping. Are you doing plastic wrap? Are you doing a Ziploc bag? Are you doing tinfoil? Talk to us about how you wrap that dough.
Lisa Ludwinski:
Yeah. We currently wrap it in plastic wrap. If we are making multiple rounds, we'll put a little bit of flour in between. I'm really looking forward to the day when we can maximize our planet's bottom line more and think about some alternatives to wrapping it in plastic because that's one of our biggest plastic uses is just wrapping pie dough. Until that's figured out, that's what we do and recommend you do at home.
Jessie Sheehan:
This is a problem with my pie dough frequently is I have tiny little cracks around the edges and I sometimes will wrap in plastic wrap and either try to massage the cracks out while it's already wrapped in plastic wrap or I assume, oh it's okay. After it chills and I bring it back out, I'll fix it. But I love that you say... I think you say you're almost kneading together the little cracks with your fingertips before you're even wrapping it in plastic. Is that right?
Lisa Ludwinski:
Once the dough is formed and I portion it out, I will take my little ball of dough and flatten it between my fingers. And then I'll set it on the counter and round it off with my hands. And at that point if I see that there are big cracks on the edges, I'll just push them together like working with clay or something. But you're right. Even if you just wrap it with a couple of cracks, it will be okay once you take the dough out. You can do that same thing and piece the cracks together at any point during the rollout process and it will be fine.
And another thing you can do actually when you're doing the rollout... Because we always start with banging the dough a little bit to both bring up the temperature to make it easier to work with but also to start the flattening process. And so if at that point you bang the dough and you get it to be about between a half inch and an inch thick, if you see the big cracks, what I like to do is just turn the dough on its side and roll it across the counter and seal the cracks up that way. So that would be a step you could do if it randomly cracked after it rests in the fridge.
The banging just helps flatten it a little bit to make it more approachable for the next steps. Yeah, I think sometimes people would take pie dough out and leave it on the counter for 20 minutes to let it warm up. But you really don't want to do that because what if 20 minutes becomes 30 and then your butter's getting all melty and it's going to be really tough to roll something like that out. And so this way we at least are in control of the temperature changes.
When we teach it in the pie class I break it down into four steps. Step one is the banging, step two is rolling out just the edges like I talked about with a tapered. And then step three is really when you're going to probably use the most of your muscle to roll out from the center all the way up to the top but stopping about a half inch before the edge since you already worked on that. And then continuously rotating the dough. Roll from the center. So at this point you're getting it to the larger size. And then once it seems as though the center is now maybe thinner than the edges, that's when I take a deep breath, step down from my tip toes and work on just rolling it out to 13 inches, eighth of an inch thickness across. And so at that point I usually end up having to go back over the edges because they've remained a little bit thick. And so that's the finishing step before you trim it and put it in the pie pan.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay, two things. First of all, I love the tip toe tip. For those that don't have Lisa's book, the tiptoe tip is in there. And if you have ever made pie dough, you will know what the tiptoe tip is even though you didn't even know it was a tip because I'm always on my tip toes and I had no idea it was a tip or that people are doing that. So tiptoes for life peeps. So tell us about... So this can scare a lot of people. Transferring the dough. You've rolled it out, it's beautiful, you've cut it, now you have to get it into your pie plate. You roll it up on a rolling pin. Do you do the four fold, three folds, two folds?
Lisa Ludwinski:
We do one fold.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay.
Lisa Ludwinski:
Yeah. We'll just gently pick it up, fold it in half. I pat it a little bit. And then I'll gently lift it up, place it in the center of the tin and then unroll it onto the tin. But before I press it down into the corners, I will just check to make sure that it's even along all sides of the circle. I guess circles don't really have sides-
Jessie Sheehan:
I know what you mean.
Lisa Ludwinski:
You know what I mean.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah.
Lisa Ludwinski:
Yeah. And then we'll press it in.
Jessie Sheehan:
And one thing I wanted to mention that that is unique I think to you guys is greasing the pie plate. Are you guys still doing that? And then I read that that helps the pie dough. Almost helps with the crimping and having the pie dough stick to the sides which I think is a great tip for home bakers. Because it can slouch a little bit while you're trying to crimp. Can you just tell us about that?
Lisa Ludwinski:
Yeah. I think we originally started buttering the tins just to make sure that they wouldn't stick to the pan. Especially with the fruit pies that will bubble over and then the fruit juices will basically turn into candy and it's hard to slice them. But it has another purpose, which some bakers at Sister Pie discovered. Not me. And they told me about it. Anyway. So yes, it can act as a little bit of a glue for the dough to the tin. So yeah, when you're rolling it out and crimping it, it helps everything stay in place and not move around. I will say not having strict professional training or going to culinary school, one thing that's really great about that is that I've been able to with the staff and the people that have worked at Sister Pie over the years develop these things. These aren't all coming from my brain obviously. And so it's through the experience of the staff making all this pie and all this dough that they've contributed their own tips and tricks. And so really as a team we figure out our best ways of doing things.
Jessie Sheehan:
Walk us through crimp drama, which I think is what you call it in the book. And about how sometimes people get a little freaked out by the amount of pressure you're putting on your crimp. I loved that.
Lisa Ludwinski:
Yeah. Totally. Because yeah, we're trying to make the crimps maybe an inch deep. And I think the reason is that if you were to bake up one of our crusts with smaller crimps, the definition in the crimps disappears because the crust bakes up and gets almost fluffy looking. That's a bad way of describing it because it's not fluffy in texture when you eat it but it grows a little bit. And so having a more defined crimp when it's raw helps maintain that decorative edge when you go to bake it. And so we'll roll up the overhang of the dough. And we try to roll it up as tightly as we can with our fingers. Specifically our thumbs all the way around the edge. So you're thinking about rolling up a piece of paper so tightly that no air could escape and that's what you want to do with the dough.
And then once you have that ring of dough resting on... You really want it to be resting on the top of your pie plate. So right on the edge. Not inside the pie plate at all, because that could make it so that the crimps fall inside or shrink down. So you want to crimp right up on top. And then you just use your one hand with a C shape and your other hand with your thumb and you just push the dough in both directions and create a massive crimp. In our nine inch pans, we get around 16, 17 crimps per pie.
Jessie Sheehan:
And now this is something that really scares peeps. Can you talk a little bit about your blind baking stuff? And blind baking for those... Well, Lisa will tell you what blind baking is. I won't. But I love the tinfoil. I don't know why I've been using parchment. What am I doing? Tinfoil is so smart. So sorry to bury the lead peeps, but Lisa, can you tell us about how you guys blind bake and what it is for those that maybe don't know?
Lisa Ludwinski:
Sure. So it's the process of almost fully baking a crust before you put the filling in. And the reason that bakers do it is because to get pie dough to a point where it's super flaky and crispy and done has to happen at a different temperature. A higher temperature than what you're typically baking your fillings at. So you're going to bake a pie crust at 450 degrees, but you're never going to bake a salted maple filling at 450 degrees because it would boil or burn. We've accidentally done it before. Believe me it's not that great. But so you have to separate those steps. And so we will take our crusts. We'll let them freeze. And you could even skip the freezing step at home. But if it has a 10 minute or 15 minute rest in your freezer at home, that's just going to make it easier for you to set up for the blind bake. And also it's great for the butter to be really cold before it hits that hot oven. Just helps it be even flakier.
So we'll take the crust out of the freezer, we will use a sheet of tin foil that's probably 12 inches long and we'll just fit it into the crust. And I like to wrap the tin foil around the edges, which is why I prefer the tin foil to parchment because then I can not only be protecting the crimps from the heat, but it also helps them stay in place a little bit. And then I'll fill the tin foil up all the way to the top of the crimps with dried beans. And you can use those over and over again. Now they can go rancid so if you're not baking pies every day like we are, you could just stick the beans in your freezer after you use them and just bring them out every time you need them. Then you bake it for 20 minutes or so until it's a nice golden brown. It's not going to be fully, fully baked because it'll continue to bake after you put the filling in. This is really about getting that golden brown crimp color and then also to make sure that the very bottom of the pie dough is really baked.
Jessie Sheehan:
Usually when I blind bake, I blind bake for a certain amount of time, then I take the pie dough out, then I take out the parchment and I use rice. And then I put it back in for more time. And I love the idea you're doing a longer period of time, but just once. So I think in the book it says maybe even 25 to 27 minutes. I just think that's brilliant. It seems a little streamlined. This is another thing I love because of my love of cream cheese, but tell people about what your trick is with cream cheese and soggy bottoms.
Lisa Ludwinski:
Yeah. I like to make extra certain that you won't have a soggy bottom crust. And so when we're making the fruit pies, whether it's a blind baked crust or a double crusted pie in which we don't do a blind bake, we put a layer of cream cheese at the bottom. This creates a seal between the juices of the fruit and the crust itself so that you can still bite into a slice of rhubarb pie and get that nice delicious juicy rhubarb, but a nice crisp crust on the bottom.
Jessie Sheehan:
And just to clarify, just so people understand. So if it's a double crusted pie... Peeps, imagine a regular old apple pie with a crust on the bottom, a crust on the top. You're not blind baking. But are you freezing till frozen solid before you fill and bake to avoid your crimp slipping and slumping?
Lisa Ludwinski:
When we do the double crusted pies, we're still following the same idea as the blind bake, but we're just doing some of the steps out of order. So with the double crusted pie, yeah, you're fitting your pie shell into the tin. You're filling up with apples, let's say. Topping it with a second crust and then crimping it up. From that point it's ready to go. But we will usually rest it in the freezer for about 10 to 15 minutes so that it can really firm up. Because the dough gets warm when you're working with it. So this is just nice to get it cold once again. And then we'll bake that at the high temperature, the 450, for pretty much the same amount of time you do the blind bake, just to ensure that we get that nice golden brown crust and that it definitely gets baked on the bottom. Then we'll drop the temperature significantly so that the filling can bake at a more gentle temperature. We do it differently. There's no tin foil involved. But they're both with the same concept that the crust needs a fast high temperature bake and the filling needs a slow low bake.
Jessie Sheehan:
I get it. And it's also good to know... From my bakery days, and I just have never stopped doing this, I always freeze the pie for an hour before I even bake it because I'm so afraid of a slumped crimp. But I'm going to try pulling back on that amount of time to see where I get.
Lisa Ludwinski:
I think it's probably fine to do it that way. So many of the things that we do at the shop are based on bakery needs and freezer space.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes. Of course.
Lisa Ludwinski:
But I've also found there's so many things that we've tried over the years to prevent the gap on apple pies between the top crust and the apples. And so there's various things that we do to prevent that, but one of them is making sure that we don't freeze it too long because then that lattice top stays frozen in place and it makes it harder to fall with the apples as they go down, if that makes sense.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. Just so if people know what Lisa's talking about, if you've ever... I feel like it can happen in a diner, but it can happen anywhere. You purchase a piece of apple pie or maybe you even make it at home and you'll notice there's a gap between the top crust and those apples. And that's just because of the way the apples slump when they bake versus how the crust bakes. One thing that you'll notice about Lisa's gorgeous, gorgeous pies in her book and in her shop are the dark, beautiful crusts. Tell peeps how long you are suggesting that people bake a pie for. I think people get this idea that they can pull a pie at 40 minutes or pull a pie when they see a little bit of color on the top, but what do you guys do?
Lisa Ludwinski:
I think that most of our color is coming from that initial bake of the crust. Whether that's with a double crust or a blind bake. So that initial 25 to 30 minutes is when you're getting that color. But at that point what we're looking for is that a filling is done. And so that's the part to me that people are surprised at how long that can take, especially with fruit pies. I remember baking a pie for the cookbook photo shoot at the photographer's home oven, and it was a rhubarb pie. And from start to finish it took two hours to bake because it's not... You got to make sure that that fruit is totally boiling in the center so it's activating the starch that you're using so that once you go many hours later to slice into the pie, it's a nice solid slice of pie. And so I think that the color of our pies doesn't necessarily relate as much to that, but because we are making a choice to have them be a darker crust, because I think that's what the color is once it's fully baked and once it doesn't have that sogginess at the bottom or raw dough in the crimps or anything like that.
So we bake it fully through is really what we're doing there. We also at Sister Pie work with a commercial convection oven, which means that everything we make is a little bit more toasty looking because of the way that the air circulates and how the oven works in general. So at home it's not as likely that you'll get as dark of a crust as some of the ones that we have.
Jessie Sheehan:
In general, don't be scared of a dark crust because that's just what's going to happen to the crust if you bake your pie long enough so that you... The way I like to think of it is you actually need to see the middle of the filling bubbling, which is why people need... If you have a crumb topping, you need to make a teeny tiny hole in the tops so you can actually... Or you can poke around later on or you vent.
Lisa Ludwinski:
Yeah. Yeah. Another thing we do is if you happen to have a thermometer. If you happen to have a probe thermometer, you can stick it in the top of the pie and we look for it to be 200 degrees and rising for a fruit pie and then we take it out at that point.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love that. And then just one of my fave things because I love saying it so much, but you tell peeps about sugar sugar?
Lisa Ludwinski:
Yes. I love sugar sugar too. It's very pleasing to say it.
Jessie Sheehan:
It is so pleasing.
Lisa Ludwinski:
Sugar sugar is just a special combination of sugars that we use at Sister Pie for a lot of things. It's equal parts, granulated white sugar and turbinado sugar. Also sometimes known as sugar in the raw or raw sugar. I like it for the tops of pies. I like to use it to sweeten the cream cheese in the muffins. We'll use it on tops of pie sandwich cookies when they're baking. I like it because it adds sweetness from the granulated sugar, pretty much just straight up sugar sweetness. And then the turbinado sugar gives it more of a textural difference and so it's kind of crunchy. So we'll use it for a variety of different applications. We actually put it on top of our sweet scones before they bake, et cetera.
Jessie Sheehan:
I'd love to hear also about different Sister Pie fillings, like your cranberry crumble. And what's the... Is it maple? What's the-
Lisa Ludwinski:
Salted maple, yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes. Will you talk about those and all of them, because they're all delicious.
Lisa Ludwinski:
Sure. Yeah. Well, cranberry crumble's actually my favorite flavor, and it was one of the very first pies that I developed for Sister Pie. So 10 years ago for Thanksgiving, cranberry crumble was on the menu. And I made it because I had never had a straight up cranberry pie before. And like we were saying earlier, so much of me wanting to do pie, or at least one element of it, was wanting to showcase Michigan produce. Michigan produces a lot of cranberries. They're very tart, which I enjoy a lot. And so instead of making a pie that was apple cranberry or pear cranberry, I just wanted to make straight up cranberry. Now to be fair, there's a little tiny bit of graded pear in the filling to help with thickening. But the flavor is pure cranberry. We make a cranberry compote that we then mix with whole cranberries, put it into a blind baked crust and cover it with a buttery oat crumble. And to me that is just the ultimate pie. With a little bit of vanilla ice cream or whipped cream on top. I love that.
And so that's one that was truly just inspired by produce and what we have available. And then other times, something like the apple sage gouda, for example, that's one in the cookbook. And it was like, how can we reinvent the wheel here? Apple pie is apple pie and people love it that way. And so I'm sometimes inspired by just adding something like a fresh herb or a cheese or a nut so that it's still very approachable. It's not food for novelty's sake. It's something that people really, genuinely would like to try, but it might just be a tiny bit different than what they're used to. So a lot of traditional methods and traditional starting points. And then we veer off here and there a little bit.
Jessie Sheehan:
Well, Lisa, I just want to thank you so much for this incredible conversation. So wonderfully and amazingly informative. So many things. So many. A billion and a half. And also I just want you to know that you are my cherry pie.
Lisa Ludwinski:
Aww, thank you.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's it for today's show. Thank you so much to Lisa Ludwinski of Sister Pie for joining us on the show today. You can follow Lisa @SisterPieDetroit on Instagram, and you can pick up a copy of the Sister Pie Cookbook at your favorite local bookstore. You can follow me @JessieSheehanBakes on Instagram and TikTok. Thank you to California Prunes for their support. She's My Cherry Pie and Radio Cherry Bombe are a production of Cherry Bombe Magazine. Thanks to the team at CityVox Studios, executive producers Kerry Diamond and Catherine Baker, and assistant producer Jenna Sadhu. Thank you for listening to She's My Cherry Pie. Happy baking peeps.