I love me some pie, especially fruit pie. I like to bake pies and eat pies (also, cobbler, cheesecake, etc.). However, pie is not exactly a low-calorie food. Googling “healthy pie” or “low-calorie pie” only brings up recipes that are neither healthy nor low-calorie, averaging about 300 calories a serving.
Does anybody have any recipes for pie, or desserts that are similar to pie, that could satisfy my craving and come in around 150 calories a serving?
A lot of older pie recipes call for far more sugar than seems right to the contemporary palate, in my experience. Unless a pie is using very tart fruit I can usually cut the sugar in half and have better pie.
The crust is the real calorie hog, of course. Leaving the top crust off helps a lot. Rolling your pie crust nice and thin helps too.
You might want to look into French tartes instead of pie. Because they are thinner they use far less sugar because there is less filling to sweeten. Also, they don’t use top crusts.
I could probably get a pie fix from mixing some fresh berries with a bit of jam (low-sugar if you want), microwaving it, and topping it with some crunchy granola. Not exactly pie, but similar flavors, and you don’t even have to bake it.
If that doesn’t do it for you, I can’t really think of anything that Sattua hasn’t covered.
You could try clafoutis. It’s kinda pie-like, but it’s not pie. It’s more of a fruit custard or crustless fruit quiche.
The Whole Foods recipe clocks in at 160 calories per serving.
Pumpkin pie is pretty low in calories. I crunched the numbers once and most of the calories are in the crust, even if you use all the sugar the recipe calls for and full fat evaporated milk.
Of course without the crust it’s pumpkin custard, not pumpkin pie.
Any kind of pie can be healthy, in moderation. Just eat servings half the size, or normal-sized servings half as often, and you’ve got half the Calories. This advice also applies to any other kind of food you can think of.
Hair pie is almost zero calories. Negative calories, really, if you put your back into it.
I actually made a clafoutis before and I didn’t really like the texture. Thanks for the suggestion, though.
Well, yeah, obviously. But do you realize how small a sliver half a slice of pie is? It would go stale in my fridge in the time I would take to eat the whole thing.
What if I just baked a bunch of fruit with a streusel topping? Would that work?
Yeah, the crust is gonna be the hard part. You can fill the pie with celery, but the crust is still gonna pretty heavy in calories.
I’ve done a variety of tartes- but they’re really not low calorie because of that darn crust. I end up eating very small servings and having to share the rest so the tarte doesn’t go stale.
I need a good crust substitute. Like Athena said, granola is a possibility. But, so boring!
If variations on fruit crisp do it for you, there is a whole dreary netherworld of alternative crisp recipes. I remember one from Weight Watchers that sticks the oats and cinnamon together with greek yogurt. If I remember correctly it was better than nothing, but really missed the crunch and fat of the real thing.
Hmm, what about philo? You get to choose how many sheets to use and how much butter to put between them. I wonder how many calories a three-sheet-thick crust would have?
Low calorie ≠ healthy.
Sugar free cookie crust bound up with a small amount of butter, fresh fruit with spices and some of that half-sugar/half-fake whatever would make a pie that’s low calorie but nothing about that says healthy.
This seems like a likely recipe: fruit with streusel topping and no crust. I would use different fruit though. Apples, pears, raisins, and papayas? Yuck, imho.
Since clafoutis isn’t up your alley, what about cobblers and crumbles? Plenty of low cal
recipes online to choose from and closer to pie in concept.
Try substituting half the flour in your crust recipe with almond flour. You’ll have to experiment with how much of the fat to leave out, it varies even between batches of almond flour, much less between brands. But it’s a great way to increase the protein and fibre, and I find that I need less sugar in the fruit part when the crust isn’t so heavy.
Experiment with different granolas - I get bulk granola from my local co-op that’s actually more like a crunch cereal. No whole pieces of oatmeal or anything like that. I was looking for something really crunch like the topping McDonald’s puts on their Fruit & Yogurt Parfaits, and that was the closest I’ve found.
I agree with you, standard granola is a poor substitute for pie crust. But I think the stuff I get would actually be pretty good.
Unless you’re joking, that’s some pretty useless advice. Even the stupidest poster here can divide by 2, but more importantly, caloric content isn’t a good measure of how healthy a food is, and pie is chock full of unhealthy stuff.
If I choose to eat half a stick of butter instead of a whole stick, that half a stick doesn’t become “healthy”.
One more idea is to make the crust out of Fiber One. recipe here. At least that’ll get you some fiber and a little closer to something that could conventionally be described as “healthy.” I actually love Fiber One, but YMMV.
Pumpkin custard wouldn’t excite me (don’t like pumpkin pie–I think it’s mostly one of the spices usually used), but my mother has made Sour Cream Rhubarb Custard before.
The big problem, though, is that if you put the custard in the pie shell, there’s the pie shell as a visual motivator to take only a reasonable portion. When you put the custard in a dish, the temptation to take enough to mostly fill your bowl is higher, rather than stopping at an eighth or a sixth of a pie.
YMMV
Portion control is relevant advice. It’s the basis for most diet plans, and the USDA food pyramid.