Breville’s new Personal Pie Maker is one kitchen appliance that got me excited when I first heard about it. It’s a countertop appliance that is slightly bigger than a waffle iron and it bakes individually sized pies in just a few minutes, cooking pie pastry from both sides with a hot, griddle-like surface. Regular pie making is not a difficult process, but it is time consuming while you wait for pies to bake and cool. You really can’t appreciate how much faster and easier the pie making process when using this appliance until you use it to bake your first batch of pies.
To use the pie maker, you need to make or buy some pie dough and prepare your filling.The dough will be rolled out and cut into rounds that are just the right size using an included dough cutter (it has a second size for cutting the smaller pastry tops), which are then pressed into the preheated pie cavities using an included dough press. The filling can then be added and the pies can be baked either open or after being enclosed with another piece of pastry. The pies bake in about 10 minutes, which is why the fillings (sweet or savory) have to be cooked before they’re added to the pie.
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When you’re strolling through the aisles of your favorite kitchen or baking store, you’re bound to notice some objects labeled “pie weights.” Pie weights are typically small, somewhat heavy objects that are used to weigh down a pie or tart crust with it is being blind baked, to prevent the crust from pulling away from the sides of the pan. Pie weights can come in many different forms. Small ceramic balls are one of the most popular varieties, although stainless steel balls are also very common. These small balls can be strung together on a chain, as well, which makes them easier to keep together when you’re taking them out of your pie crust. Despite their name, pie weights do not need to be particularly heavy to be effective, which means that instead of going out to buy specialty products, you can use dried beans or lentils as weights, too.
Before they go into your pie crust, the crust should be lined with parchment paper or aluminum foil. Weights shouldn’t stick to a buttery crust, but this protective layer keeps the pastry clean (particularly important when I’ve heard of people using coins to weigh down their pastry). I mentioned that the weights don’t need to be too heavy – a few ounces is usually plenty – but to be effective, they do need to cover the surface of the crust well. Many commercially available weights come with just enough ceramic balls to cover the base of the pie. I tend to use two sets for a regular 9-inch pie so that the weights come slightly up the sides of the crust and keep the side crust nice and flat against the sides of my pie plate. If I am using dried lentils (my weight of choice), I typically fill the crust about 2/3 of the way.
A freshly baked fruit pie, full of tender apples or juicy berries, is one of the most delicious things that you can pull out of your oven. Unfortunately, when you are baking a fruit pie, you are often left with drips and splatters of fruit juice and filling that have bubbled over the edges of your pie pastry. My solution to this is to place a sheet of aluminum foil on top of the baking rack to catch the drips. The foil typically gets stuck to the bottom of the pie plate with this method, but it is effective and it is much easier to throw out the foil than to scrub filling out of the bottom of the oven.
It turns out that there is a baking gadget out there that is designed specifically to combat the problem of fruit pie filling running over and getting stuck on the bottom of your oven. The Nifty Pie Baking Combo Rack has a circular drip pan topped with a chrome-plated cooling rack. The pie is placed right on the rack before going into the oven, and after baking, the same rack doubles as a pie-shaped cooling rack for your pie. The designers of the rack say that it helps pies bake more evenly (although if you have a standard oven rack there should be plenty of circulation around a pie even without this rack) and it has plenty of reviews from very happy covers. For a pie baker, it might be worth a look, and it might make a good gift for a bakery in your life who specializes in pies.
As much as I like Breville’s Personal Pie Maker, I’m not yet sure that I need another appliance in my kitchen – even if it is an appliance that specializes in pies. I can certainly make room for a new pan, however, and Chicago Metallic’s Pie Mold Pan is a good middle ground. This pan has cavities for four individual pies, and while they’re larger than the miniature pies that the Breville makes, this pan is a little more versatile and takes up a lot less space in the kitchen.
The pan is a heavy duty nonstic pan that will give you a deep brown pastry crust and will also provide a clean release for the pastries. Each of the cavities has a removable bottom to make it easy to lift out and serve your pies after baking. The pan can be used with just about any kind of pie filling, sweet or savory. You can even fill up each individual pie shell with a different filling! If you take that route, however, keep in mind that all of the pies in the pan need to bake in about the same amount of time and it very well may be easier to do batches to bake off different pies instead of trying to do them all at once. The pan comes with a dough cutter that will help you get the right size pastry for the base of your pies, and also enables you to cut a decorative patter on the top layers of pastry.
There are counterop appliances that will cook waffles for us, grill our paninis and even bake mini cupcakes – why not add an appliance that will bake up some pies to the collection? The Breville Personal Pie Maker is a countertop gadget that bakes four individually sized pies at a time in just about 10 minutes. Pie-making doesn’t get any quicker or easier than that.
The pie maker has four cavities that heat the pie pastry inside from both the top and the bottom. The pastry is in direct contact with the hot pie maker, which is what allows for that fast cooking time. You can use pie pastry or even puff pastry to make the crust for the pies, and the Personal Pie includes a dough cutter that makes it easy to cut the dough to the appropriate size for the machine. The surface of the pie maker is nonstick, so the pies will slide out easily and any escaped filling will be easy to wipe off the surface. Since the baking time is short, fillings will need to be cooked before being added to the pies, as most things (fruit fillings, meat pies, etc.) will not have the time that they need to cook fully and thicken.
Traditional pie making isn’t going anywhere, but I can see a gadget like this dramatically increasing how often I bake pies. Faster, less cleanup and you can bake one for yourself just as easily as you can bake more for a crowd – and indulging in my own little cherry pie with a big scoop of ice cream on top on any given weeknight sounds pretty good to me!
