Pi Day is tomorrow, March 14, and there are a lot of deals on discount pie to be had at restaurants across the country. However, maybe your plans for the holiday involve homemade pie rather than store-bought, and if that’s the case, we have every pie recipe you need.
Whether you’re looking for something hot or cold, sweet or savory, take a look through these recipes and see what speaks to you. What follows are the best pies from The Takeout’s archives, each of which pushes beyond the classics to deliver something revelatory.
This recipe for Green Tomato Pie takes many of the same spices and techniques for apple pie, but incorporates nightshades instead. Therefore, it’s not savory, as you might expect given the sourness that green tomatoes can have—it’s meant for dessert, and it’s a nice reminder of the versatility of tomatoes, even the ones we only ever seem to serve fried up with cornmeal. Get the recipe for Green Tomato Pie here.
If you’re American, there’s a good chance that you’ve never heard of a tourtière, much less made one yourself—but perhaps a love of Jeopardy! might spur you to try. This traditional French-Canadian meat pie is something the late game show host Alex Trebek enjoyed every Christmas Eve, adapting his mother’s recipe and serving it to family each year. Trebek even contributed his recipe, which includes pork and veal, to The TV Guide Celebrity Cookbook in 1994. It’s an altogether comforting dish you can try making on Pi Day, Christmas Eve, or any day in between. Get the recipe for tourtière here.
Actually, this isn’t just a cranberry tart. It’s a Cranberry Sauce Tart, offering an acidic respite on your dinner table with its tart and not-too-sweet pucker. For extra texture and sturdiness, the filling sits in a gingersnap pie crust, meaning you can pair it with a rich, savory dinner spread or save it for dessert. Get the recipe for Cranberry Sauce Tart here.
This Corn Custard Pie might sound odd at first, but it will soon win over any crowd with its bright color, an inviting flavor profile, and the irresistible crunch of a pulverized cornflake crust. You won’t believe how simple the shopping list is for this one—in fact, you probably have most of the ingredients already. Get the recipe for Corn Custard Pie here.
There’s always someone at the table who eats way more than their share, and there’s always someone else who polices every single slice to make sure no one gets too big a piece. In cases like these, it’s best to make sure everyone has their own individual pie. This 30-Minute Personal Shepherd’s Pie is, as its name implies, can be made in half an hour. If you don’t like the taste of lamb, you can use beef instead, but in that case, it would be a cottage pie, and that’s worth remembering if there’s someone in your family who likes to be annoying about stuff like that. Here’s the recipe.
A good pot pie is very much like a casserole, but enclosed in a delicious pastry crust. In Chicken Parm Pot Pie, chicken, sauce, and cheese are baked together in a breadcrumb crust that’s topped by a round of pizza dough that’s been brushed with garlic butter. Translation: no need to fry up stacks of chicken cutlets! This pot pie tastes exactly the way pot pie is supposed to taste: like home. Here’s the recipe.
This recipe is, quite simply, a chocolate-coated cookie dough crust filled with chocolate chips and pudding, and it deserves all your praise, awards, and adulation. Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Pudding Pie’s most exotic ingredient is cookie butter, and as a no-bake pie, it can handle as many or as few chocolate chips as you wish to add to it. We could go on, but the results speak for themselves, don’t they? Get the recipe here.
This pitch-perfect adaptation of Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies is a pantry pie recipe, meaning that you very likely have the ingredients on hand to whip it up right this minute. Oatmeal Marshmallow Creme Pie
has no crust because it doesn’t need one: there’s lots of toasty oats in every bite to satiate your carb cravings. The whole thing can be stirred together in a big bowl with a spoon, so you don’t even need to break out a mixer unless you want the homemade marshmallow creme for the topping. Otherwise, just use store-bought fluff and call it a day. Get the recipe here.
Hear us out: this Pi Day pie is composed of 3.14 different pies in one. How? By separating the crust into thirds, piling a different fruit filling into each one, then encircling the whole thing with an extra-thick crust filled with lemon curd. This recipe requires a lot of resting, a lot of waiting, and (most intimidating of all) a lot of intuition. But do not let fear get the best of you, pie-bakers, because this is a holiday worth celebrating properly. Heads up: you’ll need a good amount of aluminum foil on hand to sculpt this beauty. Here’s the recipe.
As long as you have a food processor, you can make this Pineapple Cashew Brûlée Pie with minimal effort. First, you process butter, sugar, and flour to make a shortbread crust. After a quick blind baking, it gets filled with a roasted cashew cream, which is also made in the food processor. On top of the cashew cream comes a layer of canned pineapple mixed with a few staple ingredients. Once it’s baked, just scatter sugar over the top and brûlée (or broil) it. Get the recipe here.
We get it. Some people are just not bakers. That’s fine. Nobody’s saying you have to spend all day in the kitchen if it doesn’t bring you joy. But if you can tolerate an extra 15 minutes, it may be worth trying this Swedish Apple Pie. The brilliance of this recipe is that it requires no pesky scraping or rolling of pastry. Instead you chop up the apples, dust them with sugar, toss them in a pie plate, and cover them with a batter that forms the top crust. Hell, make this for breakfast on a weekday if you want. You can read the recipe here.
There are some of us who are able to amaze and impress guests with the imagination and skill of their cooking. And then there are the rest of us who do our best to follow recipes as written, but somehow lack the magic touch. But if you want to pretend you’re capable of kitchen magic, there are always tricks, and one of them is Mock Apple Pie. You—yes, you—are capable of making Ritz crackers taste like apples with basic ingredients and equipment you probably already have in your very own kitchen. The recipe used to be available on boxes of Ritz everywhere, but for maximum convenience, we’ve reprinted it here.
There are few cooks more daring than Southern grannies who were apparently born knowing how to manage lard and deep frying. For those of us who grew up north of the Mason-Dixon line without Southern grannies, our only exposure to deep-fried pies was the Hostess version. Now, however, a Southern granny has shared her recipe: Granny’s Fried Mostess Pies. They are small and dainty so you can eat them in moderation, which we’re absolutely sure you will. Here’s the recipe.
There are some people who, as a matter of principle, refuse to eat fruit-based desserts. And there are some who, when given a choice, will always go for chocolate. So for these people, we give you this sublime Chocolate Custard Pie, devised by Bo Durham, pastry chef at Mindy’s HotChocolate Bakery in Chicago. The crust is crumbly and buttery and the filling isn’t too sweet. You can find the recipe here.
