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Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

Do I exercise and eat healthy?

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

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.

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

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

Eating enough pie could help with that

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