We do not exactly know where the word pie originates from, but most likely from the Latin "piehus", which meant bakery, later on fish or meat in pastry dough. It is also a possibility to make a connection with the magpie bird, which habit is to collect miscellaneous objects, just as we are free to fill our pies with what we have at home 🙂 It is practically a leftover food, and very easy to make. But there are a couple of things, which needs to be followed.

You do not need a lots of ingredients, so I recommend you to use high quality ones. I used local, biodynamic flour and butter and local salt for the dough. Work with very cold butter and water.

Make the dough

150 gram flour

120 gram butter

50 ml water

pinch of salt

Mix flour and salt, cube the cold butter into equal pieces, and rub together. Add water and mix quickly, but well. Cover the dough and let it sit in the fridge for at least 20 minutes.

Roll it out, place it in the pie mold, put baking paper in it, and prebake it with dried beans. The beans cannot be eaten afterwards, but you can reuse them several times for other pies. Bake the pie like this, for 15 minutes on 180 degrees. The reason for this, is so the filling does not soak the dough. We prevent that with making a crust.

Use your leftovers

Make any kinds of filling, from what you have at home. Basically anything can go into a pie. This time I had a couple of sweet potatoes, sausage and a small piece of very ripened, semi-hard, danish cheese left.

I prebaked the potato slices and the sausage with some duck fat and mix them with 3 eggs and some milk. Do not forget the salt, because nothing is as boring, as an unsalted pie. When I mixed the filling, I was still missing something, so I added a small handful of pistachios. It turned out to be a very good idea.

I took out the pie from the oven, removed the beans with the baking paper, and poured the filling into it. Temperature stayed, and I baked for an other 35 minutes. When the pie was almost done, I grated some more cheese on the top and baked for an other 5 minutes.

To bake a pie is so much fun. You can make it with kids, they can help you with rubbing the dough, rolling it out and put the filling in. Fell good about not throwing out leftover, because it is just a little bit of this and a little bit of that...but reuse them! Be creative, every time you bake one, you can experiment with new ingredients, and on this way discover (invent?!) new dishes. Is this going to be mom's boring pie again? No! This time mom is going to make a .... ?