I agree, except for ice cream - I think the refreshing cold counteracts the overwhelming sweetness of the pie.
But in general I find most American pies are too sweet. I prefer to make my own, but use about 1/3 less sugar than the recipe calls for. (I don’t think sugar is an important structural component of pie - reducing sugar doesn’t seem to affect anything except taste.) My favorite so far is this Rhubarb Peach Cobbler recipe. (OK, a cobbler is not technically a pie, I know…)
41 posts in and nobody has made a joke about Hair Pie?*
You people are slipping.
Great band name, btw.
Well, living in Thailand, I seriously considered it. But then I thought, “Nah, too easy.”
Done, done, and done. Bought 3 packages of Concord grapes at the grocery store, This should have been more than enough but I guess I tossed enough “sort of icky” ones that it brought the totals down. They were indeed easy to peel. The resulting large bowlful of skins looked odd. The smaller bowlful of skinned grapes was delightfully horrifying: greenish spheres with something (the seed) in the middle, floating in liquid (the juice which drained off the spheres). Looked like a bowlful of fish eyes. Yum! And I was stunned that they smelled and tasted exactly like Welch’s Grape Juice. All these years I’ve been eating table grapes (e.g. green seedless) and wondering how they got the stuff in the jars to taste so, so, “purple” 
The cooking went well, The seeding did not. The mush would NOT go through my strainer. Ultimately I resorted to picking out the seeds, one by one, with a spoon. This took a while.
Then I put the stuff back in the pot to heat it back up, and added the sugar (only 1/2 cup - it would have been inedibly sweet if I’d added more!) and the skins and simmered briefly. The result was like bright purple goo and, thankfully, all semblance to fish eyes was long since destroyed. Baked the pie the next day. Ate some that day, and though the filling was very runny (it set up nicely by the next day), and the skins lent an odd texture, it tasted good. Once I got over the “it looks like blueberry pie but it sure doesn’t TASTE like blueberry pie” mindset, of course.
So… I’ve ordered a food mill from Amazon and plan to perpetrate this again in the future Spare grapes will also serve nicely if my daughter’s scout troop does another “Fear Factor” at their Halloween party next year. I can think of little more charming than the lovely girlish faces as they stick their fingers into the bowlful of FISH EYES :cackle:.
Good God!
Talk about labor-intensive!
If the seeds aren’t separating, it’s because you likely haven’t been cooking the “fish eyes” long enough, or hot enough. You should have a simmering pot of grenish goop that gives off a delightful odor of grapes, and you will see the seeds begin to separate and move about freely within the mix.
You then pour it into the strainer, with a bowl underneath. Much of it will go through. The rest I find I have to PUSH through with the back of a wooden spoon (I then scrape it off the other side with the same spoon). It takes a little while, but not nearly as long as pulling out each and every seed by hand must take.
You don’t have to cook the skins when you put them into the strained pulps – just mix them in. You ought to let them sit for 20 minutes or so before you add this mixture to the pie shells. (I usually use the time to mix up my dough, roll it out, and spread it in the pie plates).
Other things;
– You can make little Grape Tarts by using a muffin tin. I did this this year, and they came out really well. Or you can buy mini pie tins.
– The cooked up pie filling makes a great garape "compote’ that goes well over shortbread or ice crream or what have you.
Yeah - that’s what I figured. The recipe I followed said, basically, bring to a boil then mill/strain immediately - in other words, the recipe shoulda said cook longer. But by the time I figured it out, the goo was mostly stuck to the strainer and seemed too late to try again with the pan. Possibly it would have worked fine with the shorter cooking time if I owned a real mill vs. just straining it.
I also didn’t simmer the skins for long - just a minute or so to make sure they gave up their purply goodness.
I’ll definitely do this again but experience is the best teacher.
Oh and what is this “mix up my dough” of which you speak? 
I’m lazy - I use a refrigerated pie crust. I’ve made pie crust from scratch and have decided that “been there, done that, bought the T-shirt, time to move on”. I imagine a good homemade pie crust is better than a decent store-bought one, but a decent store-bought one is better than my homemade attempts. And I don’t care enough to perfect my technique for that. So Pillsbury it is 
Typo and I once had dinner with a couple where the wife loved to make pie crust, but dumped in canned filling (shudder). Whereas I hate making pie crust, but like making the filling from scratch. The spouses decided they should have us wives go into business together. They gave up that idea when they realized they’d eat up all the profits and die of obesity-related diseases within 2 years. I do believe that store-bought crusts are better than store-bought fillings!
I’ve been making these pies every year since I learned about them, no matter where I was living. In Salt Lake City it was hard to find concord grapes. I couldn’t get them in the stores (maybe that’s changed since then, or I wasn’t looking in the right stores, or in the right window of opportunity), so I found people who had grapes growing in their yards and offered to trade – let me have grapes, and I’ll bake you a pie.
So one couple let me pick grapes, and I made two pies, and gave them one.
Their one and only comment:
"You used store-bought pie crust mix, didn’t you?"
Since then I’ve always made the crust from scratch. It was easier after I took up with Pepper Mill and she showed me the right way. This year I got high praise from her for the crust.
It DOES make a difference.
Oh dear - how embarassing that must have been!
I imagine pie crust mix is nearly as bad as the crust on some low-quality store-bought pies I’ve tried. Mealy, tasteless, sticks to the roof of your mouth as though it were made using Elmer’s glue. Bleh. That would ruin even the nicest pie.
My choices right now are:
It’s probably best for my waistline that I never master the art of making good homemade crust But I do have to ask: what fat do you use? I’ve heard lard is the best but have never tried it.
I’ve heard lard is good in cakes. I’ve never heard about it being in pies. I’d never use it myself in anything – too high a YUCK factor. I was brung up on Crisco myself.
But for pie crusts I use unsalted butter. Works great.
Mr.Meacham,if you are a skilled pie crust maker,it behooves you to try lard,at least once.
Can’t be too hard to overcome the yuck factor? Leaf lard has a pleasant smell and yields matchless flakiness.
Instead of having a wedding cake, we had 20 pies of assorted flavors from Just Pies.
People still talk about it.