what is the best knife to cut pies with? a smooth blade or serrated knife?
I’ve always found that a plain butterknife works just fine. Too sharp a knife, and you can damage the pan, especially if it’s a cheap aluminum one.
I thought that serrated knives were only to be used for cutting bread, but that may be and ‘old wives’ tale’.
What sort of pie? A proper pie with meat and gravy in it, those weird fruit pastry dishes, or a pizza (which is not a pie but I’m told is referred to as such in parts of the US)?
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Let’s move this to Cafe Society (from GQ) since that’s where the foodies who will have the best answers to this tend to hang out.
I don’t think it’s even an old wives tale. You can cut whatever you want with a serrated knife, it will just make a mess of some things. Serrated can work well on tomatoes and tough meat among other things. If the serrations are sharp enough it hardly matters. Many knives made of thin super-stainless-steel are serrated and will cut almost as cleanly as sharp smooth blade.
Martini Enfield is correct, it all depends on the type of pie. If it has a hard crust then a serrated knife will saw through the crust without crushing it. For a soft pie a butterknife will do as Chronos mentions.
How is pizza not a pie? It’s bread plus filling (aka “toppings”). Is it the yeast? Is pie supposed to be made of crumbly shortbread?
I grew up thinking that calling pizza a “pie” was weird, but not necessarily wrong. Then I started calling it that on my own for the novelty factor, and now it’s a habit. I didn’t think it was an Americanism. Except insofar as pizza is an American food (that merely pretends to be Italian).
There is also the question of the heat of the pie (hot, warm, cold) and consistency.
You may want a warmed knife, or even a different utensil altogether.
america test kitchen how to serve the perfect first slice of pie video shows using a smooth blade… chef knife? why would you use that it looks like the crust is harder,wont the serrated be better?
I thought bread + filling = sandwich. Are you saying pie = sandwich?
If the bread is baked with the filling inside it? Sure. Sounds right to me.
Slicing an already cooked loaf of bread and putting filling inside it would be a regular sandwich. Put the filling in the raw dough and cook them both together and you’ve got something like a calzone, which I would consider a pie.
But I’m not 100% sure. I would consider a Hot Pocket a pie (in fact I used to make a homemade version all the time based on the Good Eats episode “A Pie in Every Pocket”), which is basically a tiny calzone, but I would not consider a corn dog a pie.
I was about to object that a corn dog is fried, not (usually) baked, but then, so are McDonald’s apple pies (or at least they used to be; they might have changed that to make them seem healthier).
On the other hand, the “filling” of a corn dog is a discrete object, not a quantity of substance. That might make a difference. And the meat makes up most of the structure of the corn dog. I can’t think of anything called a pie where the filling is a countable (or rather, counted) noun.
Chef knife’s are/should be sharp. If you follow their instructions for that kind of pie, you should be fine.
You may have noticed, from the questions, that there are a lot of kinds of pies. Sometimes other choices for cutting utensil are better. Sometimes it is all personal preference. If you try the Test Kitchen method and don’t like it, then let us know and we can make other suggestions. Since you’ve got the video, if you have a knife like that, why not try it?
Pies have discernible tops and bottoms, although the top and bottom may be indistinguishable. Corn dogs on the other hand, well, they just shouldn’t exist.
i have tried the america test kitchen way and the question is not weather i tried it or not ,its what i have been reading and seeing on the internet. some use for a fruit pie a smooth blade and some use a serrated,but they dont go into detail why use one over the other. that is what i am trying to understand. (maybe its preference…but should say so)
Fried pies are definitely a thing, though McDonald’s does bake theirs now, or at least did in 2000 when I last worked there. I doubt they’ve gone back to frying them.
I think you’re onto something with the solid meat filling. You can have a smooth filling, like chocolate, pumpkin or lemon pies, and you can have a discrete filling, like apple or rhubarb or chicken pot pie. But one solid piece of meat is not a pie. Beef Wellington is not a pie, nor is a corn dog.
On your next pie, try several different kinds, and report back. There may be a dearth of empirical data on this, and you can be, well, on the cutting edge.
I might warn, though, that it might depend on whether or not it has a crust on top, or merengue, and whether the crust is solid or lattice.
I think the knife has to be wet to cut merengue. Otherwise, it will just lift the whole merengue off the top.
last week …this is what i did …fruit pies with a top and bottom crust with both smooth blade and serrated…did not notice any differences just a mess . merg. lemon pie yes used boiling water to heat up blade and cut ok … pecan pie same two knifes no big difference. so started looking in cookbooks and on web and seeing the two knifes i mention being used …but again with no help which to use when.
What’s a “merg. lemon pie”? And were these pies fresh out of the oven? You might need to wait for a bit for the pies to cool before attempting to cut them.