Yummy pie….with tomatoes?

Food

Oct 10

Yes indeed this is a pie with tomatoes, perfect for the beginning of tomato season, or for when you have loads of leftover tomatoes towards the end of the season, or quite frankly, any time of year with juicy tomatoes of all kinds from the farmer’s market or your nearest grocery store. If at the store, aim to go with the tomatoes grown closest to you as they probably will be the freshest, and consequently, the tastiest option having travelled fewer miles to arrive at your local store.

Early Girl tomato in my dad’s garden headed for pie

Now I have to say right up front: this is a dish that I adore, and Mike stays far far away from. Reason - mayonnaise in the pie topping. For Mike, mayo means glockija! I’m pretty sure there is no formal spelling of this word — this is truly a Mike Baker or Baker family idea. As much as Mike and I love to co-create in the kitchen, and we love to adventure with our food during our travels, there are some tastes we do not share. I will always remember during the first weeks we dated, my roommate Megan and I hosted a BBQ using the grill that I bought with my first paycheck from my teaching job in Virginia. I was so excited to have all our friends over for a big party. I loved going to the store and buying all the fixings for the BBQ including the ground beef for the burgers, a number of side salads, and all the condiments one could put on a burger. Mike tended the grill for a bit, and I noticed he didn’t even put cheddar cheese on his burger. What??! Then he ate his burger with literally nothing on it! I mean it was patty and bun, that’s it! What???!! Where is the fun in that?

Then the next day when he and his friend Matt (his best man at our wedding three years later) came by to watch football on our big screen TV (that weighed what seemed like 100 pounds and stuck way out in the back), they actually chose to eat Chick Fil’ A over this massive spread of leftover food that Megan and I were more than happy to share. Later on I learned that some of these foods Mike was avoiding was part of what he called glockija — foods like mayo, mustard, ketchup, mayo-based salads, or treatments of various foods that involve big gloppy onion pieces in a dish where, in his mind, they should be much more refined…

“Mike interrupting here… let me clarify by saying that I like onions, but that I prefer they are minced as finely as possible when eaten in a dish, such as a risotto. In this form, they do not trigger a glockija reaction. Moreover, the aforementioned ‘big gloppy pieces’ of onion — a statement that unfairly mis-characterizes me as possessing an anti-allium disposition — also fall beneath the glockija threshold when used exclusively (usually in whole, halves, or quarters) as a base for stocks.”

Whatever. I live with him. I know him. Anyway, he blames his particular avoidance of mayo on an incident when he was a kid when and he and his male cousins were left at the daycare center at Scott Air Force Base (his uncle was in the U.S. Air Force) where they served baloney-mayo sandwiches while his sisters and female cousins were taken shopping with his grandma, mom, and aunts. I agree with his “no fair!” to that. :)

But now having been married to my dear boolo for over twenty-three years, I have learned how to navigate the glockija factor. Sometimes it’s a matter of using an ingredient — like Dijon mustard in my homemade Caesar dressing — and just not telling Mike, so he can fully enjoy the food and not realize there was any glockija involved in its making. Sometimes it’s simply feeling bad for the guy that he’s not having quite as much fun as I am with my palate as he avoids anything that registers on the glockija index. And what has been the biggest sticking point as I’ve grown into this non-stop food-maker over the years, who loves to make certain things — like homemade potato salad in the summer — I have simply learned that there are some things I will have to get the full enjoyment of sharing with people other than Mike. As many homegrown chefs and meal creators probably feel, you make food because you love the process of creating edible goodies, but you also love the act of sharing those goodies.

When I first started making the Tomato Pie this season using tomatoes from my dad’s garden and including Mike’s most dreaded ingredient — mayo — I knew I would be sharing with my folks and friends and not my boolo. While I devoured this pie literally three times in a row over the course of just a couple weeks using loads of harvested tomatoes, Mike stayed clear away from it; instead Julie, Erin, and Karen were my first buddies to try it out. And they all said: YUM!!!

This recipe was love at first sight. I LOVE tomatoes (and mayo), and I love pie, and I trust Vivian Howard, one of my favorite chefs (for sure the subject of future posts). (If you haven’t checked out her old PBS Series - A Chef’s Life - I highly recommend it. It appeals to a wide audience including my neighbor Julie’s 8-year-old daughter Genna who loves to play chef and with whom one day I hope to co-create this dish.)

Vivian’s cookbook is more like an autobiography and food/travel/farm narrative than traditional cookbook. It’s probably the thickest cookbook we have. I love to read her delicious and practical stories about the various fruits and vegetables and other core ingredients like rice, eggs, and peanuts that are featured in what she describes as Eastern North Carolina cuisine: “a complex cuisine with abundant variations shaped by terrain, climate, and people.” And I love to make her recipes. Jeannie and Jim, my in-laws gave us the book for Christmas a couple years ago, and during the pandemic, I have enjoyed savoring it in chunks during quiet quarantine moments.

Now on to the recipe!

Pie Crust:
1 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
2 ½ teaspoons granulated sugar
6 tablespoons cold butter, cut into ½-inch cubes
2 tablespoons ice-cold water
½ teaspoon vinegar

Flour, sugar mixing awaiting cubed butter

Make the crust: Place the flour, sugar, and salt in the bowl of a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Mix on medium for a few seconds. Then begin adding the butter one cube at a time. Continue until the flour is speckled and crumbly. With the mixer still running, add the water and vinegar until just combined. Do not overmix. Lay roughly a 10x10-inch square of plastic wrap on the counter in front of you and turn the dough out onto it. Wrap the dough tightly in the plastic wrap and chill in the refrigerator overnight.

Bring the crust to room temperature. Dust your counter and rolling pin lightly with flour and roll the crust slightly larger than your pie pan. Lay the crust in the pan and press gently into its edges. Cut off the edges that hang over and discard. Freeze the crust in the pie pan for at least 15 minutes or until you’re ready to blind-bake.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Lay foil or parchment paper on top of the crust and weigh that down with dried beans or rice. Blind-bake for 30 minutes.

Pie crust ready for at least 15 minutes in the freezer

Filling and topping:
1 tablespoon butter
1 large yellow onion, halved and cut into julienne with the grain
2 teaspoons salt, divided
3 1/2 - 4 pounds tomatoes, cut into 1/2-inch dice, divided
1 teaspoon granulated sugar, divided
1 teaspoon picked thyme
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
10 turns of the pepper mill or ½ teaspoon black pepper
1/2 - 1 cup picked basil leaves
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1/3 cup grated Fontina
1/3 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

Make the filling and topping: Preheat your oven to 375 degrees.

Toss half the tomatoes with ½ teaspoon salt and ½ teaspoon sugar. Set them over a colander and let them drain while you get everything else ready, at least 30 minutes.

Toss the remaining tomatoes with ½ teaspoon salt, the thyme, and the olive oil. Spread them out in a single layer on a sheet tray with as much room separating the individual pieces as possible. Slide the tray onto the middle rack of your oven and roast for 20 to 30 minutes. You’re looking for the tomatoes to dry out and brown slightly. Once they come out of the oven, they simply sit until you mix everything together.

While you drain the fresh tomato mixture and roast the other tomatoes, in a medium saute pan or skillet, melt the butter and add the onions and ½ teaspoon salt. Cook the onions over medium-low heat till they are deeply caramelized. This will take about 40 minutes. If your onions get away from you and burn a little, add ¼ cup of water to the pan, scrape up the overbrowned bits, and keep going, In the end, you’ll have a scant ⅓ cup caramelized onions.

Once all the individual components are done, stir together the onions, the fresh tomatoes, the roasted tomatoes, the remaining salt and sugar, black pepper and basil. In a separate, smaller bowl, stir together the mayonnaise, Fontina, and Parm.

Spoon the filling into your blind-baked crust and crown it with mayo-and-cheese topping. Bake in the middle rack of your oven for 30 minutes. You can enjoy this warm or at room temperature. Both are super yummy. I have even enjoyed this dish cold right out of the fridge for lunch.

Makes a 10-inch pie.

Thanks Dad for the deliciously ripe tomatoes! Ready for pie.

Creating the tomato mixture which makes the pie super-sweet

Onions, butter and salt starting to cook

Combining drained fresh tomato mixture with basil

Happily coated in fontina parm and mayo - YUM!!

Autumnal bursts of reds and golds complemented by the green of basil

My dear boolo playing chef which he does so well. Dual processing fried catfish and fried okra!

So ready to dig in! We earned it after a day of canoeing… Mike’s plate of course did not have the delicious pie with glockija on it. ;) — So ready to dig in! We earned it after a day of canoeing… Mike’s plate of course did not have the delicious pie with *glockija* on it. ;)

Michael Baker

Yummy pie….with tomatoes?

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Air-tight is all right!