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What we learned from a couple of local pastry pros about making savory pies

I’ll be the first to say it: I’m a cold weather wimp. There is little relief from the frigid temperatures that I have other than complaining about how cold I am; one of the few reasons that I love the winter is that it brings a reason to bake treats for my loved ones in the holiday season.

But by March, the holidays far in the rearview mirror, I was in search of a new culinary project that could bring a warm sense of comfort.

An avid baker, I feel comfortable making cookies, cakes and sweet pies — the operative word being sweet. But savory pies — and savory cooking in general — are another story. I almost never cook meat, on the off chance that I could give myself salmonella. Plus, cooking always feels like more of a chore than baking because it’s something you have to do. That's why I sought out this new culinary challenge. Savory pies and their flaky, buttery crusts and comforting fillings are the antidote to the winter blahs.

Savory pies are not an easy baking medium to work with. They’re vulnerable to a number of fallibilities: You don’t want a dough that’s too overworked and loses its flaky texture, and your filling can’t be too wet or else the bottom of the pie will have, as “Great British Bake Off” host Paul Hollywood loves to say, a “soggy bottom.”

On a mission to master the art of savory pies, I went straight to a couple of local pie professionals to learn some of their secrets.

After many visits to the original Hoosier Mama location on West Chicago Avenue and slices of pie enjoyed, I knew that I wanted to get some baking tips there. The small Chicago-area chain started to make savory pies a few years after the shop opened.

“We were tired of eating sweets all day,” owner Paula Haney joked. “We worked so long getting our pie crust the way we wanted it, that there was a period where we were just like, ‘Well, what else can we put in it?’”

“The great thing about these pies is that they’re rustic,” Paula Haney of Hoosier Mama said. “This is something you throw together to feed your family. It was a way of preserving and using up meat.”

Manuel Martinez/Manuel Martinez/WBEZ

The filling for the supper pie includes caramelized onions, Granny Smith apples, crème fraîche, mustard, sage, parsley and pork sausage.

Manuel Martinez/WBEZ

One pie that came from that process was the pork, apple and sage supper pie. Haney walked me through how to create the filling for the savory delight at the Evanston location of Hoosier Mama. There, she explained that her inspiration for the recipe came from olden-day English-style savory pies that were heavy on the meat and potatoes. The biggest difference is that her pie uses an American-style crust, which is flakier and more tender and needs a tin to keep its shape, rather than creating a tougher, freestanding hot water crust.

This recipe, along with many savory pies, is the intersection of cooking and baking. As someone whose skills better align with the rigidity of baking, which requires precise measurements and less room for improvisation, this combination scared me.

“The great thing about these pies is that they’re rustic,” Haney told me, perhaps sensing my anxiety about the daunting task ahead. “This is something you throw together to feed your family. It was a way of preserving and using up meat.”

Together, we chopped up cubes of unpeeled red potatoes that would mix with caramelized onions, Granny Smith apples, crème fraîche, mustard, sage, parsley and pork sausage. The smell was intoxicating, and the sweet-nutty smell of the onions with salty sausage and herbal tinge of sage was so tempting that I wanted to eat the mixture straight out of the bowl.

The inspiration for the pork, apple and sage supper pie came from olden-day English-style savory pies that were heavy on meat and potatoes.

Manuel Martinez/Manuel Martinez/WBEZ

A slice of the finished pork, apple and sage supper pie.

Manuel Martinez/WBEZ

Another important factor in creating a savory pie, Haney shared: intense flavors.

“The crust has a lot of fat, a lot of butter, and that dulls your palate,” she said. In this recipe, the mustard and sage cut through the fat to create a strong, nuanced flavor. When tasting the filling, she said “you want this to [have] about 10 times more flavor than the finished product, because that’s what the crust is going to take away.”

After learning the finer points of what makes a good savory filling from Hoosier Mama, I felt like I still had a lot to learn about building flavors in a savory pie. When researching where to find some of the best savory pies in town, Reddit led me to Chiya Chai, a tea-and-food chain that has two locations in Chicago.

I walked into the Logan Square kitchen to find Emily Garcia Lopez, the chef who makes all of the pies here, hacking into 1-pound blocks of cold butter, which would soon turn into 40 some-odd hand pies. As the name implies, Chiya Chai is also a place where you can get a cup of good tea.

“We're thinking about street foods in India, Nepal and South Asia in general, and just things we enjoyed eating with chai,” co-owner Rajee Aryal said about creating the menu at the tea shop. “I also knew about these savory pies that were very popular in other parts of the world where there’s a big Indian diaspora. So for example, in England, they have a lot of curry pies. The things that we put on the menu were all things that are very South Asian that speak to our heritage, but also very approachable."

“We’re thinking about street foods in India, Nepal and South Asia in general, and just things we enjoyed eating with chai,” Chiya Chai co-owner Rajee Aryal said about creating a food menu.