Mumbai Food: This workshop has all the lowdown on pie making

Pastry chef Namrata Pai at an earlier baking workshop

There's something about a pie: that baked dish with a flaky pastry containing sweet and savoury fillings, which screams comfort food.

A staple during Christmas and the holiday season in the West, pies are finding favour in the city too. Keeping that in mind, the kitchen cum dining space Magazine Street Kitchen is organising a workshop dedicated to just pies.

Head pastry chef Namrata Pai will conduct the workshop, which will cover four kinds of pies - crusts and fillings. These include an Apple Pie, Pumpkin Pie, Frangipani Tart, and Cobbler. There will be vegetarian, eggless versions too. "We generally use an egg wash to give the crust a beautiful glaze. Here, we will teach you how to compensate for that using cream or extra butter," explains Pai.

Pai will guide participants on the importance of getting the temperature and pastry consistency right, and knowing when to stop kneading the dough. "In an apple pie, you heat butter in large cubes so that the dough gets crispy and flaky after baking. In a pumpkin pie, you don't need the crust to be too flaky so you heat butter in smaller pieces," she says.



The workshop will start with a demo and then participants will be handed recipes detailing the steps needed for the pies. They will also be offered the option to experiment with fillings, like adding saffron and whole nuts to the Frangipani tart to give it an Indian flavour.

"You need patience with pastry. Also, you need to remember, you are using a mixture of semi-processed products and completely raw ingredients that all react to water and temperature differently. Understanding that difference is important," says Pai. "The pastry dough that I make in Colaba may not be the same as what I would make in Thane, because the water is different."