Where Can I Buy Towne House Fried Pies

With a handful of exceptions, it's tough to find a good piece of scratch-made pie when you go out to eat around Asheville. We're flush with wonderful bakeries that make spectacular pies — Geraldine's, True Confections, Ruth and Ranshaw, Short Street Cakes, Owl Bakery, Kara Jensen and her Smoke Signals in Marshall — but ordering that slice at the end of a meal out on the town or mid-afternoon with a cup of coffee isn't a choice at most area restaurants.

Are we in a pie desert? Or do we have a pie in the sky opportunity?

When you ask around for what restaurant to frequent for pie, the answer is often Buxton Hall and the work of chef Ashley Capps. Capps, 31, has a pastry chef track record of baking all over the East Coast, from Danny Myers' Eleven Madison Park in New York to Chef Hugh Acheson's Five & Ten in Athens, Georgia, to A-B Tech, where she has been teaching baking and pastry arts for five years. Her role at Buxton Hall is her first gig at a barbecue restaurant.

"You know the saying 'easy as pie'?" Capps asked rhetorically. "It's false. With pie, people can see your mistakes."

At Buxton, pies are front and center, recalling small Carolina barbecue spots where a family is involved in every aspect, typically the men of the house being pit masters and the women baking pies. "Maybe it's because of the older Southern cooking methods," Capps said, speculating on the frequent marriage of 'cue and pie. "Pies are a low and slow process, just like roasting a hog.

"But some Southern baking methods contradict classical French techniques. Some people think meringue isn't good unless it's got sugar beads on top. From a classical standpoint, that's actually a mistake — the meringue shouldn't leak liquid and bead up. It's like my family always wanted pound cake baked until it was not quite done. The cake gets a little crack in the top. It's called a 'sad streak.'" The "sad streak," Capps explained, is the coveted, slightly gooey piece of cake, the one her dad always claims as his.

Since the restaurant opened this past fall, Capps has made every type of seasonal pie imaginable at Buxton — local pumpkin, butter pecan, local apple, butterscotch (a tribute to her grandmother Ovella) and lots of variations on chocolate.

"When I was growing up in Burlington, at any special occasion, there was always a separate dessert table. Everybody brought their specialty," Capps said, adding she's excited for spring and summer seasonal fruit pies such as strawberry rhubarb, blueberry, blackberry and peach.

With easy access to hog fat, Capps renders her own lard and favors leaf lard with its pure white silkiness for her pie crusts. The type of crust she makes "depends on the pie," some using lard, some using lard and butter and some using butter only. Her pie crust is amazing any way she makes it, and she has cultivated a loyal "pie and coffee" conclave at Buxton.

For Valentine's Day, she is making little sample packs of scratch-made "moon pies," with flavors including caramel, peanut butter and raspberry/chocolate. "We'll also have 'red hot love buns,' passion fruit pie and something very chocolate. I'm making chocolate-covered pork cracklings," she said. Capps' whole pies are also available for pre-order at the restaurant.

At Early Girl Eatery, chef John Stehling has enviable quality control over his scratch-made pies. The reason? His parents. In their kitchen in Arden, Bob and Shirley Stehling bake scratch-made pies for the restaurant every week.

"My parents make all the pies, cakes and quick breads like banana bread and pumpkin ginger bread. They like doing it for the grandkids," chef Stehling said. "My dad was a baker at Old Salem for years, so he knows what he's doing. When I was in grade school I always had a valuable baked trading commodity at the lunch table.

"We tried different routes with crusts and tried some shortcuts. But there's a reason they're called shortcuts," Stehling said with a laugh. "They've gone back to using butter and some vegetable shortening and their crust is delicious." Stehling's most popular pies at the restaurant are strawberry rhubarb, apple, lemon shaker and, most requested, the peanut butter pie with chocolate Oreo crust.

At King Daddy's Chicken and Waffles, Stehling's second restaurant, in West Asheville, "We do fried pies. Lots of apple but also savory like lamb pies," he said. "I make one that has Benton's country ham, Looking Glass Creamery cheese and a poached egg inside."

So, Asheville, as we dangle precariously over the pie precipice, how do we encourage more pies in our restaurants? One answer is to spread the love.

That's what Marshall baker Tara Jensen is doing with her Smoke Signals bakery, just featured in a lengthy, colorful article in the latest issue of Bon Appetit. The story highlights the brick oven, time-tested methods of Jensen and her artistry — both in the ingredients and baking as well as in her artful designs. Pies, she states are where she finds the "Art in Artisan." Jensen only bakes a few pies a week so you have to be vigilant to find one in a Marshall shop. If you're serious, sign up for one of her much lauded workshops. www.smokesignalsbaking.com

Ask any knowledgeable pie maker, such as Barbara Swell and Ashley English, and they will tell you the secret (and the challenge) of making great pie is perfecting the crust. "It's all about the crust,"  said cookbook author and foodways teacher Swell, who does a pie-making class at the John C. Campbell Folk School twice a year. "I learned from my grandmother, who inspired me for all things old-timey. She grew everything we ate and made everything from scratch in our little West Virginia town."

"I have many secrets to making a good crust," Swell said. "You need to keep the gluten from developing so you have a tender crust. People tend to let the ingredients get warm and then overwork it. Your ingredients need to be cold and they need to be handled lightly. You have to measure your flour accurately and your flour-to-fat ratio needs to be right," said Swell, adding, "I have a Pyrex cup measurer with no numbers I've had since I was 18 years old. But I can measure out 126 grams of flour by looking at it."

Swell also insists on great ingredients like Carolina Ground flour, made locally, premium European butter and sometimes leaf lard, which she gets from the Chop Shop and renders herself.

Swell and her husband, musician Wayne Erbsen, do their part to champion pie and then some. They are famous for their annual pie parties at their home in East Asheville, where lovers and makers of pie pilgrim every summer. The party started in 2004 when Barbara was working on a pie cookbook. "We had 99 pies last year and 20 different categories," Swell said. "If you come to the party, you have to bring a pie and no store-bought crusts allowed!"

Ashley English, author of "A Year of Pies," finds the crust-making process restorative. "Pies aren't fussy," English said. "The assumption is pies are intimidating. But there's no leavening agent, so I find it the opposite. I find pies to be incredibly forgiving.

"I love to bake. I love the specificity of it. You have to let the gluten relax and your pie cool properly before you cut it. It's meditative for me," said English, who also teaches pie making at Hickory Nut Gap Farm. "I don't use a processor. I want to feel when the dough comes together.

"We need to keep pie making alive," English said, "and there's a new generation of people doing it. It's not an antiquated art. We need to keep it on menus and in our discourse in the South. In the Midwest, pie is huge and at every diner." English sees a pent-up pie demand in Asheville area restaurants.

Claire Baxter, co-owner of Ruth and Ranshaw, a family-owned small bakery in Fairview, believes pie making in general is a trend to be seized. She's seeing lots of brides order wedding pies instead of wedding cakes, or wedding pies in addition to wedding cakes. "We've done exclusively pie weddings," said Baxter, whose co-partner and sister Colleen Baxter is the pastry chef. "I think it's because of Pinterest and the fact that brides want their wedding to be unique. Pies are more hand-crafted, usually sourced locally, made locally and made with love. There's a homey-ness to them, a bit of nostalgia."

Employee to buy Short Street Cakes

Where Can I Buy Towne House Fried Pies

Source: https://www.citizen-times.com/story/entertainment/dining/2016/01/28/heres-where-buy-pie-asheville/79014742/

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