I baked a pie every day for a year | Hacker News Reader

I baked a pie every day for a year

theguardian.com

303 pointsNaOH211 comments

Pie is such a gift. My wife died nearly ten years ago and soon afterwards, I took up pie baking, which is something that she loved to do (I just loved to eat it — since childhood I've had a birthday pie instead of cake). I had all the stuff, after all. I got good at it and love to share them with friends at gatherings, or even just give them away entirely. Right before COVID, I did a Friday Pie Day thing where I gifted a pie to someone in town based on social media discussions. One time, someone got it for her coworkers who had just shipped a tough release.

When everyone got into baking early covid I couldn’t understand why no one was baking anything, like, good. No pizza or pie or cake or muffins or banana bread or even a damn focaccia. The world collectively just decided the end-all be-all of baking was… sourdough.

Maybe because the large time investment and trial+error in making good dough provided something to focus on when stuck inside.

Not trying to gain weight when being stuck inside, maybe.

Sourdough is the bomb though. I agree about the lack of variety, but in its defense, sourdough starter can be used for a variety of other baked goods.

Plus bread itself is used in other recipes, like sandwiches or toasts or for mopping up sauced dishes.

Or even brew beers and meads.

With sourdough these would not be great. I did something similar with a mead and it came out like a sauerkraut wine

As others have said it’d wreck the flavour but you can go the other way and use spent grain from the mash in making bread which adds some pretty interesting texture and flavour.

Yes it's a common misconception that you can only make wide crumbed hipster crusty loaves. Those are great but if you want plain white bread, buns, croissants, etc etc it's all possible to do.

well, i love the smell of sourdough bread in the morning

smells like...victory.

Well, as a less-advanced baker, I get the most pleasure from baking bread.

Plus, I can eat it without getting fat.

I wish I eat bread without getting fat.

Bread is calorically dense on its own actually

Compare it to pie

Sourdough is fantastic, I have two loaves finishing their overnight chill in my fridge right now, will bake them after dinner.

I was baking sourdough since before the pandemic, and will continue baking in the future. It's a bit of work, but it's not too much work and the results are pretty damn fantastic.

Focaccia though, if I baked that regularly I'd have to go back on a GLP-1. Focaccia taught me to read the seals on olive oil in the supermarket and actually pick the right one for the break.

Wait, did I write this? Same, same, same.

>Focaccia taught me to read the seals on olive oil in the supermarket and actually pick the right one for the break.

Come on, you can't just drop that morsel without telling us what we should be looking for in the right olive oil for focaccia.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YCt2txu11d4

Great video that talks about selecting the olive oil for your use case and which seals aren't just self granted. I personally have been using colavita. Its fantastic.

I hate it but it's taught me that freshness actually matters. I bought some for focaccia and it was amazing. Saved it in the pantry for special occasions. Went back six months later and it had zero flavor. Just tasted like generic oil. Flat.

It ruined me.

Also if you're an engineer and like cooking, check out that guy's YouTube channel, He's very analytical in explaining cooking

I knew you were talking about Ethan before I even clicked the link. He's the GOAT.

I can't figure out what "seals" or "break" mean in this sentence. What am I missing here?

they possibly meant nutrition label and bread

They are possibly capable of answering the question themselves.

They answered before I did

Seals as in the certifications on the bottle.

Break is an autowrong. Should be bread.

A fringe benefit is the discard. We refresh ours every day 10g/10g/10g so it adds up slowly but steadily. Two great uses are waffles and pizza crust.

Waffles: https://www.seriouseats.com/bread-baking-sourdough-waffles-r...

Pizza crust: https://www.sourdoughhome.com/sourdough-pizza-made-with-disc...

Just got a loaf out of the oven. The smell, the crust, the whole feel of something very much tangible and enjoyable . I'm very much considering opening a small bakery.

I know what you mean (I also love to bake and have had the same thought). Just remember that running a bakery is more about running a business than it is baking. If you love baking and business, great! But if you just love baking, it may kill the enjoyment.

I love sourdough, have starters in the fridge but haven't baked in a while, should do it.

Problem is, for some reason it never tastes sour enough, or like the commercial sourdough. I have done slow rise in the fridge over 24+ hours etc. Made sourdough starter from scratch several times, same result.

Bread tastes good, just not sour, or rather sour enough to tell it's sourdough.

Starters are a mix of bacteria that produce either lactic acid or acetic acid. If yours is never turning out sour enough you might be: using too much commercial yeast, not using enough starter, or having a starter culture biased towards lactic acid.

The first two are easy to fix. The third one is saying you need to keep your starter culture a little bit cooler. I keep my downstairs where the starter is between 62-67 during the winter and its plenty sour. I think dryer starters might be less sour, but I'm not sure. I run mine 100% hydration.

I'm currently baking this recipe: 300g bread flour, 300g whole wheat flour, 227g starter (100%), 541g water, 18g salt, 1/8tsp of commercial yeast. All the usual baking steps, over night retard. Two loaves

For one thing, yeast was in short supply, so if you wanted to bake regularly, sourdough was a good option if you could keep it going.

It wasn't for no reason at all though. There were concerns about availability of yeast, which isn't used in sourdough. (Valid concerns or not, I have no idea.)

I do find it kind of wild how intimidating most people I know find baking. Get a food scale and follow the directions and you're good to go and will have something respectable and delicious. As with anything, you can dive deep and go extreme with it. But baking delicious food is not rocket science.

Funny you'd say that. Other people say cooking is art, while baking is a science. No room for errors.

Baking bread is fun because its not science. It had guidelines but thats it

Science can be fun!

Cooking is art, baking is a very easy science (weight things and check the temperature), pastry is another thing. That requires talent, experience and a lucky star.

if there was no room for "errors", how is it possible that there are tens of thousands of different bread and cookie recipes and stuff like that?

Because while the recipes are easy to follow, you can't fix a baked dough. If you messed up the salt, the yeast, etc. that's it. Cooking is more forgiving in that sense.

Those people are dead wrong on both counts. Cooking meals benefits more from precision than they claim (if you want reproducible results you best be measuring!), and baking does not require as much precision as they claim (I estimate ingredients all the time when baking and my bakes come out great).

There's a lot of mysticism around baking online, but in truth it's very easy. Just follow the recipe and you'll be ok. You don't need to carefully weigh ingredients and stuff like people say.

It depends, I guess. When I make pizza dough, I use around .1% yeast. Using .4g instead of .8g would make a huge difference, and getting that right without carefully weighing it is neigh impossible.

It is fun but it's also not universal. While every house and apartment I've lived in in the USA had an oven, the default in Japan is no oven. 1 to 3 burners, and possibly a broiler is the norm.

If you want an oven you get microwave/oven combo.

Might be similar in Korea? China? Taiwan? India?

Baking bread is not like that unless you have strict control of the environment; it is sensitive to temperature, and nature of the water and flour. It's an art; you have to read the signs. And mastering that is rewarding.

I baked a Napoleon cake. It was amazing, took 11 eggs and it was the one and only.

> The world collectively just decided the end-all be-all of baking was… sourdough.

I can't speak for the world, but:

1. Good bread is really hard to come by in the United States. Unless you're going to a bakery twice a week[1], or your local grocery has a contract with one [2]... Your idea of 'bread' is probably mushy garbage that I would describe as more similar to 'cake'.

2. Sourdough is relatively easy to make. Flour, salt, water, starter, time[3].

---

[1] Going anywhere to buy one item that is eaten or goes bad in three days is a big ask... Which is why this isn't a great option.

[2] The overwhelming majority don't, and when they do, they want $7 a loaf.

[3] Which a lot of people had plenty of.

Good bread is everywhere in major cities in the US. There are bakery sections at grocery stores and there are many local bakeries.

> There are bakery sections at grocery stores

There are, and most of them don't have good bread. (Baguettes are about the only good bread that you can reliably expect to find in them. Sometimes they have San Francisco-style sourdough, which in my experience, tastes like someone dumped a shot of lemon vinegar into it. Just because a bread uses sourdough starter doesn't mean it needs to taste sour. I feel much the same way about hops and beer.)

Regularly visiting the bakery is, for reasons I've mentioned, a lot of friction for one purchase.

My closest one carries... Weird specialty hipster breads (because it is more focused on tarts and pastries and sweets - bread is just an afterthought for it).

The one I'd go to, if my closest grocery weren't stocking them is way out of my way. I would not be making that trip twice a week.

> Regularly visiting the bakery is, for reasons I've mentioned, a lot of friction for one purchase.

That is still not "really hard to come by" as per your original claim. It's very common (not just in large cities!) to have a local bakery where you can get good bread. Whether you choose to go or not, it is available to you.

I mean, let’s at least discuss this in good faith.

“Good” bread according to the majority and bread that is specifically up to your standards are probably two very different things.

My grocery store’s bakery sells many types of fresh bread: sourdough, white, rye, croissants, ciabatta, buns, rolls, bagels, and so on. Many grocery stores in my city have a bakery section with a selection of fresh bread like this. (Even Walmart I think, but I don’t shop there).

It’s not the best bread I’ve ever eaten, but it’s fresh, good, tasty bread. It’s not “mushy garbage” and it’s not “cake” like you described in your original comment. It’s not “weird specialty hipster” bread. It’s just simple, real, fresh bread.

if it makes you feel better, we got into baking during covid and never baked sourdough once. we made pizza, cake, muffins, banana bread, regular bread, cornbread, etc. we just didn't post about it online ...

IMO it's because it's more challenging. I've baked everything you've listed and apart from pizza (which is also bread) it's all trivial to do. You just follow a recipe.

Bread is a totally different thing. Only four ingredients: a ground up grass seed, a mineral, a single celled fungus that lives in the dough, and water. The results range from complete disaster to the best thing you've ever eaten. It all depends on your technique.

That's why it has captivated so many and in particular men, as you can get really deep and geeky. There's only so far you can go with banana bread.

> The results range from complete disaster to the best thing you've ever eaten. It all depends on your technique.

Hear hear. I'm at a local optimum where my bread tastes good, but it's a bit crumbly. When I change anything, it's nope nope backpedal. Trying to find the next step that'll improve my home baked bread

We started doing sourdough in lockdown for 1 reason. The shops nearby were out of yeast. kinda limits your options

When I graduated from university, my dad had just died, my mom had cancer, and there was no employment for a year. I made a lot of pies and got really good at making crusts. Yep, it was always great when I brought in a real pie, homemade.

What a tough situation to be in. It sounds like you handled it well, I don't know if I would have had your strength

I'm so sorry for your loss.

What a wonderful way to keep your wife's memory alive.

Totally. I started baking pies because it was a tradition in my family and my wife can’t cook. To make sure my kids had the family food tradition I learned to bake. Once you get a system down, like anything else, it’s not that hard. Plus pie filling has time to bloom if you make it day before. Pie dough can be made ahead and freezes well. Individually these things aren’t hard or time consuming.

I started making my own simple bread and now I can’t eat store bought bread. Just takes like sawdust to me. It’s not really all that hard. Add a little rosemary and some olive oil and it’s delicious. No need to fuss over sourdough (over rated in my opinion). Over time you learn how ingredients work and what ratios work. So becomes easier and easier. I can throw together amazing corn bread and be eating it a little more than half hour later.

For me the change would be to become spherical. That would simplify some calculations.

half way there, now you just have to find the frictionless vacuum

A friend of mine tries to bake a spherical pie for pi day (March 14) each year, with varying approaches (and levels of success).

Heating the middle has to be a pain. And cutting it…

Well if you insert metal rods through it you can help with the heat transfer, then you can lattice over the holes. If you pumpkin pie it, you might even be able to have it hold up under its own weight. Plus a bit of stiff whipped cream in the holes would help.

I would make them fairly small (personal pie-sized) and use a filling that doesn't need to be cooked in the oven to set. The main limiting factors, I think, would be structural integrity and heating the filling to the center. You could set it on a ring (like the rim of a spring-form pan) to support it better during cooking. Now, a four dimensional hyper pie, on the other hand...

If we don't care what the filling is you could just use sticky rice.

If you’re not cooking the filling, then do a teflon ballon that you put the crust on. Cook. Remove balloon. Then pipe in ready to ready to set chocolate cream.

One of those spherical ice cube makers but made of cast iron, a little like those little waffle makers.

I don’t think those will work, you want the outer surface to be crispy. The dough’s gotta go on the outside of the sphere.

I would bake it on a pizza stone to ensure an even bake.

Has nobody here ever done this? It comes out perfectly cooked.

You cook a spherical pie on a pizza stone? Do tell.

I cook a circular pie on a pizza stone.

A pie like this, to the face of a problematic politician, would add drama and help resurrect the profile of pies as activists!

One could always precook the filling.

I’m pretty sure that the state of the art right now is firing the pastries on a ballistic arc in hard vacuum and hitting them mid-trajectory with a laser pulse to cook them through.

The first two things that spring to mind are pasties from the UK (which are not usually spherical but can get quite hemispherical), and the "UFO-Döner" from Germany (which are more oblate spheroids). Maybe by combining these ideas, your friend can get closer to their dream?

British steak and kidney pudding (a steamed pie of suet pastry) is a truncated cone shape, could go spherical with the right pastry case.

A truncated cone is called a "frustrum" which always seemed fitting to me.

Beef Wellington could be spherical if you so chose.

I suspect that deep-fried-battered haggis might exist which could be very spherical.

I heard circles are also related to pi but have not had the time to confirm yet.

That's a pi-ty

Pies are more of a Tau day thing https://www.tauday.com

Sure would be a lot easier if we could just have “4 right angles”-day

> A friend of mine tries to bake a spherical pie for pi day (March 14) each year, with varying approaches (and levels of success).

Could also do it on pi approximation day (July 22), then one doesn't have to be so exact about it.

I didn't get it, so I looked it up.

22/7 ~= 3.14

Actually closer to π and matches the more sensible date format.

(Yes this is worth fighting over!)

while true that month being 1st making little sense, the good format usually features leading zeros, so '22/07'

355 / 113

( = 3.1415929204 )

is one approximation I have read about, attributed by some, to ancient or medieval Indian or Chinese mathematicians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximations_of_pi

Now I'm considering making a Matt Parker pie: a spherical pie made from a normal pie + calling it close enough in 2 out of 3 dimensions.

So a "Parker square" of pies then?

I wonder if they could look to dim sum for inspiration? A apple dumbling is basically just a round apple pie right?

There are some old 18th century pies they cooked in boiling water inside a bag which could be quite spherical. Townsends on youtube has some videos on it.

Isn’t that essentially a stuffed pudding? Or do some use pie dough

From what I understand many of the pie doughs of the period were the same thing as pudding dough, everyone had a pot to boil stuff in and it was just extra if you had an oven and pie pans, sometimes with noted cooking times for a pan at the end. The that era of American cooking kind of blends puddings and pies so that they mean basically the same thing. Similar someone making a pan fried rice recipe today and just adding on the end of the recipe if you are fancy and own an actual wok you can adjust cooking times for that.

Do I exercise and eat healthy?

"Yes, I am in shape (round is a shape)"

Yes, me too. Reading the caveat "– and she would give each pie away" made a lot more sense.

It's a social commitment at least as much as a creative/culinary one, and since there aren't a lot of people you'd want to give a pie minus a slice to, that keeps the extra calories under control.

Yep. And if one gives away the "QC Passed" pies - then as your skill improves, you're eating an ever-shrinking fraction of your output.

And you feel like you're growing ever-thinner, as all your friends & neighbors eat more and more pies. ;)

That explains so much. She seems wholesome but is actually a psychopath plotting to look better by surrounding herself with fat people.

The pie calculation for spherical you would be 3*volume / 4*radius^3.

Eating enough pie could help with that

I’m of the belief that doing just about anything every single day for a year will change your life! A key for me has been to “lower the bar” so that I can keep the promise to myself and maintain momentum through days of low energy or enthusiasm, e.g. playing the guitar for 1 minute, or writing 1 sentence.

Similarly, just showing up at the gym/hobby/sport is huge. Even if you do next to nothing.

Yeah I go bouldering even on off days to “stay in the rhythm”. And I do have honestly terrible days where I feel I’m struggling climbs of even a grade below my comfort level, but at least I went lol.

How do you stay injury free climbing every day? I feel like at even twice week I am entering the danger zone with ligamentisis.

I suspect they mean "days that I deal off" rather than "every day". Even elite climbers struggle with ligament issues climbing every single day

Name checks out! Your clarification makes sense on a second read. Thanks

Yeah I definitely meant on days I feel off, and not that I climb every day haha. My body wouldn’t allow me to do daily climbs :)

Someone said it, I forget who: 90% of life is just showing up

Especially true for friendship. If you want friends, all you have to do is be in the same place with the same people regularly.

I think I recognize your handle, and I’m not sure we agree on much, but because of your comment I’m seeing a friend I haven’t seen in a decade. I sincerely thank you for the nudge.

I'm glad I could help! Do you mean you recognize my handle from previous interactions on here or in another setting? I haven't used this one anywhere else.

Just here. I’m not a prolific World Wide Web traveler.

I think it was Woody Allen.

The best form of exercise is the one you can consistently stick with.

For me, that got shot down in flames over the winter because I kept getting sick. :/

I didn't go to the gym a single day for November and December and it was heart-breaking when I started again in January how much I had set back. But slowly I got back to a good rate again.

A week ago someone asked why I was going to the gym that evening and I said, "Because it will make going tomorrow so much easier."

Start again.

I’m cycled almost ever day for a few years them took a 6 week holiday where we walked 15-20k steps per day. I thought that I’d be ok when I got back on the bike.

I was not ok.

a stranger i once talked to at the gym told me "every workout is better than the workout you are not doing" and that kinda changed my perspective on that topic.

Atomic Habits is a great book for little things like this that make a big difference when compounded with time.

I imagine reading a book about habits every day for a year would be life changing. :)

It's basically a form of meditation. It's a great way to get your life back on track

Yeah, doing a small thing daily can add up so fast.

When I started my niche-musueums.com website I bootstrapped it by posting a new museum I had been to every day for a month. It took 15-30 minutes a day and within a few weeks I had a site I was really proud of.

I think the key is to give yourself permission to stop without feeling guilty about it. Any time I start a new streak like this I deliberately tell myself that it's not going to be forever and I can stop any time for any reason.

I love your website! Your url has a typo, here's it fixed in the meantime https://www.niche-museums.com

I took a 20-minute walk every day for a year. I don't know that it changed my life, but I think it kept me healthier than I otherwise would have been at the height of the pandemic, and it also gave me a point of pride in saying that I had the resolve and discipline to do something every day for a full year, come what may (did?).

It taught me the importance of ritual, and it also taught me how... incredibly imperceptive a lot of people are. (I was living with a family member at the time, who was constantly asking me if I was "getting out of the house" regularly. Yes. Every day. For a month, and then 3 months, and then half-a-year, and then almost a full year, and then more than a year. On that note, it's essential to not let others' expectations cloud your appreciation for what you're doing. Somehow, it had wormed its way into my subconscious rationale that part of the reason that I was taking my walks was to live up to their expectations. When it became clear that they didn't really care - at least not enough to notice - that kind of deflated things a bit.)

That's

>lower the bar

the classic: "aim low, avoid disappointment"

The hardest step is usually getting started, at least for me. Reducing the cost of getting started feels like half the job.

This usually means having the supplies ready and the tools out.

That's definitely not universal. I play/practice music, almost every day for at least 30 minutes, and it has no influence on my life, as far as I can tell. I cannot imagine that playing the guitar for a minute has any.

It feels bizarre to claim that playing guitar for 30 minutes a day has no influence on your life. Surely it brings you joy or satisfaction or keeps your skills up if you're a professional. Why do you do it if there's no influence? Couldn't you use that time for something else?

For fun. But I don't see how it influences/changes my life.

You think having fun has no influence on your life? You think sitting bored in a chair would give you an equivalent life experience?

I challenge each and every one of you to make a pie by the end of the month.

I made one, for the first time in my life, last week. It brought me tremendous joy not only to make it, but to have something nice to share with friends.

I already did for October, November (twice), and December. Does that count?

It would have if you hadn't asked. But as it stands now, I regret to inform you that you'll need to make another pie.

OK then... let's see, it's citrus season -- meyer lemon meringue it is, with a swiss meringue[1] of course.

[1] https://www.seriouseats.com/easy-swiss-meringue-recipe

I did this recently, and you know what I really loved about it? It's a great entry-level baking activity where the upside is that you have a pie (something you can gift or just eat!) and the downside is that you have a sort of cobbler. You really can't !@#$ up a pie. Omelette is another good one. At worse you have scrambled eggs.

I mean, yes, at worse you burn your neighbourhood down and your dog runs away. But in terms of the more likely failure modes like screwing up the dough, breaking it, messing up how watery it is, etc. you can mostly just keep baking until it's done, mix it up, put into bowls, serve with ice cream, down the hatch.

> You really can't !@#$ up a pie

I mean, it's hard to end up with something completely inedible but you absolutely can mess it up. Soggy wet pastry at the bottom is the biggest problem but there's plenty of advice around about how to avoid that.

> You really can't !@#$ up a pie

I agree. When it comes to baking, making it tasty is mostly a matter of including the correct ingredients. Nailing the texture is the hard part, and that’s where technique and practice comes in.

Do it! Making a pie might seem unapproachable, but it will all work out. I have never failed to make a pie that brought some happiness into the world.

Even broader, honestly. Make something culinary! It's amazing what the simple tactile experience of making something can bring when so much of our existence is doing things by proxy.

A fun hobby I picked up during Covid was trying to cook food from countries I had never been to - since traveling anywhere wasn't an option.

Pick a country, research what food it has that you've never tried, find a few online recipes and YouTube guides and give it a go.

This was a ton of fun. I have no idea if anything I cooked was even remotely like the authentic original, but it was still a very rewarding exercise.

If you live somewhere with a lot of international supermarkets (the SF Bay Area is great for those) it also gives you an excuse for a shopping adventure for ingredients.

(My favorite recipe we tried with this was Doubles from Trinidad https://www.africanbites.com/doubles-chickpeas-sandwich/)

My grandma made Platonically Ideal Pies, and I took up the art years ago. Mine, if I say so myself, are quite good, given that with Grandma's example I know what I'm shooting for.

I haven't made one for a few years, though - having a pie in my house is a recipe for me eating 5000 calories of pie and vanilla ice cream over the next few days.

When my grandma died a few years ago, I asked my aunts if I could have one of her pie pans. Apparently none of her other 17 grandkids thought to ask that - so I got all three (philistines!). Those basic metal pans are among my most cherished possessions.

My "pie" is barbecue ribs. I've made them many, many times, and I've never eaten them all by myself.

Once I fed about 20 friends--one of the best days I've lived.

In case you did not actually nail perfect, flaky crust the first time, that's a fun parameter to try to optimize. I finally got it at some point, and when I did, I realized that all those old cookbooks that said things like "use little water" and "keep the dough cold"---all the tricks where I thought "that has to be a myth"---turned out to be essential. The Joy of Cooking is full of old wisdom like this that has taken me ages to appreciate.

The "trick" to baking all kinds of things well for the first time is to follow the recipe fanatically. It says high protein flour? Use that, not all purpose flour. It says 500g caster sugar? Don't think that's going to be too sweet and add 400g, the sugar is where the texture comes from (and there's plenty of less sweet recipes to choose instead). It says make sure the dough is chilled? Chill the damn dough!

Once you've baked it perfectly to the exact recipe a few times, then you can start adapting.

Of course, there will come a point in your skill level where you will have the intuition to adapt recipes that you've never cooked before. But many people assume they can do that immediately, fail, then assume they can't cook and give up.

I will say though that the other biggest area where people fail is having a janky oven that can't maintain a stable temperature, or where you set it to 200C but it only reaches 160C. So an oven thermometer is a useful tool to buy.

Pi day is coming up (it's a Saturday), so surprise your friends and or coworkers by making a pie for Pi day

I decided to make rotis every day for a month (am male of Indian origin who hadn't ever cooked breads), AND eat them. The first one was completely inedible. The 30th day's rotis were edible, but nothing like what women in my family make. But still, edible.

Eventually had the confidence to experiment with making Naan.

This led to experimenting with Asian-style Pot-Stickers.

The main benefit to me was confidence, and belief in pmarca's "you can just do things".

Why didn't you just ask the women in your family what they did to make them? It shouldn't take 30 attempts to get a basic flatbread recipe to be edible. It's not like all the women in your family devised recipes on their own - they just watched other women make them and learned how to do it that way.

This is like asking why someone built a text editor as a hobby project when Microsoft Word exists. There is value in experimentation and play, in trying to understand things from first principles. It would often be faster to just ask others, but if everyone did that, we would miss out on a lot of innovation.

It's more like taking 50 attempts to design a scalable font format instead of looking up how TrueType works.

Yeah, I can't believe the TrueType people didn't just use METAFONT.

If you're looking at it solely from perspective of "value" in experimentation and play, then that value mostly comes from expert level understanding of the ingredients and the process. To not ask for guidance from people right near you who know far more than you just seems like egotism.

Who has a better chance of developing an innovative omelette dish? Thomas Keller, or someone who can't make scrambled eggs without setting off the smoke alarm?

The point is, experts can bootstrap you so you can progress quicker than you can on your own. This is why mentors exist, and is the basis of Bloom's 2 sigma study.

It really depends on what your goal is. Some people just like "play." For example, I am terrible at video games--when somebody tells me that they "beat" a game, this usually seems unfathomable to me. The last video game I finished was Riven, back when Riven was new. I still do play now and then. I play Skyrim poorly. I like walking around and discovering things in the Skyrim world. If my goal had been to beat the game in some way, then I would be going about it terribly. But that's not my goal. It does not have to be because egotism.

In my experience, dealing with flour is an art, not a science. You just have to do it over, and over, and over, until you internalize the parameters and can adjust to them on the fly. The look, the feel, the temperature, the smell, etc.

Yes, and experts can guide you with feedback far quicker than you can perform these experiments and adjust the parameters on your own. This is exactly why mentors and apprenticeships exist.

Being intentional in what we do and learn, and practicing it consistently, inevitably changes our lives.

We mostly live on autopilot, without thinking about what we love to do or what we might love to do.

Every day, we read about people whose lives have been changed by jiu jitsu, CrossFit, or learning a foreign language.

It is dedication, focus, goal setting, and practice that change our lives, not so much the activity we devote our time to.

Although pies are delicious and I love making them.

It is funny how the conversation immediately shifted to sourdough and the pandemic. I think that era taught a lot of us that having a physical ritual, something you can actually touch and smell, is a vital anchor for mental health. When your entire work day is spent moving bits around a screen, producing a physical loaf of bread or a pie feels like a radical act of creation. It is less about the food itself and more about the proof that you can still interact with the physical world in a meaningful way.

I started practising guitar every day and it didn't change my life but I have a lot of fun doing it.

There's still time, my friend. Keep it up.

Not to take anything from any other activity that someone embraces, but I imagine that for the majority of people in the developed world, taking a 1 hour walk every day would be the most "life changing" thing you could do.

What does that have to do with the article? It is not about 'the most life changing thing for everyone', it was what was life changing for her.

Nothing at all. Just a comment on the internet. Taking a walk AND and baking a pie is even better.

I'm just making a slight point that walking is probably the simplest most effective thing you can do to improve almost every aspect of your life.

Sure, but it's random and unrelated to the discussion at hand.

I bake pies but I also like mushrooms and grilled cheese sandwiches. Every other individual here has random associations they can make.

In person, this is seen as commandeering a linear discussion to your personal topic and repeated violations get you uninvited from conversations for being selfish.

On the internet we can just ignore a thread, which is what I should have done here but I've typed this far so I'll go ahead and post it.

I don't think it's off-topic at all. The story is not as much about baking pies as it is doing something every day.

The point of the pies was the connections it forced her to make with people in her life and then ultimately strangers. Finding 365 people to give pies to is probably harder than baking them all.

Taking a walk alone would be missing the main point.

Move to San Francisco!

Or just even think or look out of the window I feel like would do the world some good. Maybe I’m being negative I really don’t know at this point.

A very timely article when many of us are wondering if AI will eventually push us out of a digital career into something else.

I am hearing rumors that B2B sales is rebounding back to more in-person meetings. Cold emails don't work anymore. I've heard similar tales of current teens early-twenties that there is a trend of doing things in real life again. But... more likely if you start measuring it people are more reclusive than ever, and doing things that used to be normal is now considered "niche and trendy". Our sales process at least is very online-meeting oriented...

The sarcastic individual in me saw the title and thought "heh, and you got diabetes?" But I was pleasantly surprised after reading it about how wholesome this was.

She is obviously a sweet lady that you would like to have as a neighbor. But I would not include garden variety pie in the wholesome category. The indulgence won't kill you, but it isn't healthy. Apples from her backyard tree are wholesome.

As someone who loves pie and has far fewer friends and family than the person this story is about, baking a pie every day for a year would also change my life.

Friends are always attainable via purchase.

Also neighbours tend to be very glad to receive free stuff :) I usually end up with way too many Basil plants every season and give them away, gotten to know some new neighbours that way!

If you just place the pie to cool on your window sill, the smell will cause some nearby hobos to float over, or so cartoons have lead me to believe. Then you'll have some friends.

Do you have neighbors?

These kinds of stories may seem silly to some (certainly it would seem silly to my past self), but I think these narratives of personal journeys are going to become more and more important to humanity as AI and automation take over most jobs.

Lovely story but the beautification is a bit off.

> Hardin Woods would bake [...] using fresh ingredients local to her home in Salem, Oregon

> She baked her first pie, a lemon meringue

> The next day Hardin Woods made a peach pie

> After that came a chocolate cream pie

Does lime, peach and chocolate ripen within the same season in Oregon? Vickie cooking for is community is already touching, this claim about freshness and locality is skimmed by people who are already convinced, spotted by those who disagree and raise critics of the skeptics.

I mean, the first pie was in California, per the text right before that. She was visiting family.

Right, the location is off too! The ingredients probably aren't sourced in Oregon after moving to California, but anyway the season ("fresh") and location ("local") point stands. I guess she use local eggs.

Between "The Guardian" and it being a warm/fuzzy-type story, I'd read that as "fresh local ingredients when available".

Vs. too many pies have fillings straight out of a can.

Christmas 2013 my mom gave me a nice stand mixer. She knew I like to cook and bake and owned a bread maker but she knew I always felt bread makers were good but just fell short or being great. This gift also changed my life forever.

Days later on New Years I decided my resolution would be to not buy bread for an entire year and make it all myself. Also I was a father or 3 and funds tight back then so buying bread for school lunches all the time really added up.

So I started making bread and did not buy any for months. Slowly it became better and slowly I started making other items like pizza dough and bagels and cinnamon buns. I got to a point where I no longer needed to measure and could just free pour ingredients and my baking was really good.

Then soon into 2014 I decided to buy a huge stock pile of flour and several other ingredients from Costco so had like 200lbs of flour and lots of oil and pasta sauce and chicken and suddenly work laid half of us off until things picked up. Having all those ingredients saved me and my kids. Never did they go hungry. We ate lots of pizza and always had bread and bagels and if I had to buy it already made there is no way I would have made it.

I did not achieve my resolution on July 14 2024 me and my wife split up suddenly after some shenanigans on her end and I was suddenly the primary care giver for 3 kids and the stress was too much and I did not have it in me to continue making bread but kept strong for my kids and never let on my struggles.

Lastly even though I did not achieve my resolution I did make it almost 7 full month's making bread and I never lost it. I still make bread but my biggest hit is homemade pizza. My kids struggle to eat store bought stuff as my home made is just so much better. If anyone would like some simple pointers on how to make amazing pizza dough comment and I would be happy to give a few quick tips.

Yes please! I'm getting pretty decent at bread now, I've been making a loaf every three days or so for a few months. But I would love to add pizza dough to my skills.

My biggest tip is so easy and after starting it the difference was immediately noticable. And this applies to pizza or bread dough.

There are many factors that will change how your dough tastes, feels and bakes. Texture is a massive factor on how people rate your bread or other doughs. Two big factors that massively help with that are as follows.

First knowing how long you must knead the dough for. I won't get into too much detail for this just look up dough window pane test on YouTube and there are lots of videos. The TLDR is you knead until you can take a small ball of the dough and gently spreading it with your thumbs should be able to make a thin pain that lets light through easily without ripping. If it rips you need more kneading. Again look at some videos.

The BIGGEST improvement to my doughs was when I started adding powdered milk. I use about half cup to 3/4 cup when making enough pizza dough for about 3 large pizza. For a couple loafs of bread probably half cup is plenty. Again lots of information on why powdered milk helps but will let you research if you want to know more.

All I can say is that my dough was always good before milk powder but the day I saw the suggestion to use it and did I can't go back. I have had friends say my pizza is the best they ever had. Last year my ex asked me if I wanted to come meet her friends and some girls but also would I mind making some pizza dough lol!

Honestly there are lots of tips for good bread and dough but just adding milk powder will up your bread huge. Good luck I hope you give it a go if so also hope you come back and comment how it went. Cheers!

Baking everyday as a way to keep a professional identity is an interesting idea. Being semi-retired, I’ve noticed that I am starting to struggle the curiosity and motivation that kept me going when I still worked. This article makes me think I should pick up a habit of doing some “work” daily.

Yeah, I think it's a tough one for some people. Case in point: my parents.

My father has always had a million hobbies, and his work was what was preventing him from fully exploring them. He's taken to retirement like a fish to water.

My mother on the other hand (still working at 73) like most academics has been very dedicated to her work, and her main hobby outside of work has been hiking.

I'm a little worried that she'll struggle a bit to adapt to retirement.

https://archive.ph/6YBoH

Beautiful. I recently saw a youtube video [1] on radical neighboring that really inspired me. Led me to another book on the gift economy [2]. All which to say, I now always bake two loaves of bread. One I keep for the family, the other I give away.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dynQV-oKM0E [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/208840291-the-serviceber...

Nah, that's not a pie! [brandishes a Yorkshire meat and potato pie] Now, that's a pie.

Apologies to Crocodile Dundee.

Refreshing. There truly is an almost mysterious bliss hidden in giving.

It is something hard wired in our brains. Cooking, social connection, giving, all in one. We evolved to cook for each other. No wonder she is damn happy. Being 60 helps too.

Pie - specifically pie crust - is my specialty. I'm in a constant quest for the best (and simplest) method. It's also a very tasty hobby.

I occasionally make a pie, and while I had problems getting the dough workable (too tough/crumbly, or too wet/sticky), the taste and texture so far turned out quite nice. It's just butter, castor sugar, flour, baking power and a bit of salt (and a bit of egg when the recipe demands it). However, I can't say I've got a good feeling for it.

So what's your recommendation? Other ingredients? Special tricks? Do you keep lab journals?

Just seeing your question - here are some notes:

The key is to have small (rice grain/pea size) chunks of butter evenly distributed through your dough without "working" it too much which generates gluten resulting in a "tough" crust.

My latest approach is this one: Evenly mix the salt and sugar with 2/3 of the flour and then quickly mix in the cold butter with a food processor* - just enough to distribute it through the dry ingredients. Then quickly mix in the remaining flour.

Dump that mixture into a bowl - it will crumbly and too dry for a crust. Now, carefully sprinkle cold vodka (to wet the flour without producing gluten) and cold water over the dough and FOLD it in with a spatula*. Envision the flaky layers you want in an ideal crust and understand that you are trying to mechanically create those layers with the spatula.

Then, form into a ball, wrap in plastic and chill for several hours. Then, you can take it out, dust the ball with flour and roll it into a pie pan-sized disc. Don't be afraid to use enough flour on the surface and dough ball to keep it from sticking.

https://www.seriouseats.com/cooks-illustrated-foolproof-pie-... https://www.seriouseats.com/myths-that-need-to-go-away

* Another approach, if you don't have a food processor is to freeze your butter and then grate it directly into the bowl of dry ingredients tossing the flour frequently to coat the individual bits of butter and preventing them from clumping together. Once all the butter is grated and mixed in, add the liquid and fold it in.

*If you are having issues with the dough being too dry or wet add the liquid a bit at a time while working it in and just stop when it gets to the right consistency.

Because it’s the guardian I assumed she was British and therefore making meat pies, gave me a different vibe for some reason.

I was worried that this is sone LinkedIn post. Thank god that was not it. Wholesome.

If AI continues like this, we can all retire and bake pies all day long.

I would love a pumpkin pie right now. But I'd settle for pecan.

Waffle House pecan pie can hit the spot. ... cup of black coffee, damn fine.

Sweet potato pie is at least as good as a pumpkin pie if you've never tried it. If you're making filling from scratch, it's easier too. I learned not too long ago that the "pumpkin pie" my mom made every year was actually a sweet potato pie... that kind of blew my mind.

I wonder if there is a savory sweet potato pie. Would be great with gravy and cheese

This reminds me of "The Artist's Way".

Read the title and was like ”what did this guy do, deploy a new version of Linux ever day? Moreover, it’s spelled ’Pi’”

Is it just me or since The Guardian left twitter/X they've really been ramping up their paywalls/nagwalls? Love or hate X/Elon, that was really a dumb move on their part.

To be more precise: she baked breadbowls and calzones. :)

I didn't even read the article, but the headline made me smile.

One of the most Guardian headlines of all time. I'm old enough to remember when they were a newspaper.

All went downhill when Rusbridger went. Viner turned it tabloid, clickbaity, embraced more of the Lifestyle section etc.

Indeed, Rusbridger at least had a spine.

Government job. Retired at 61. But I made a pie everyday!

Some people find meaning in ways other than the prestige of their employer.

Software developer isn't a very prestigious title either. The only thing it has going for it is the pay.

Gave birth at 18 solo while her partner was in prison. Probably deserved a chill life?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com