Doing Business / MAKING PIES : Sugar ‘n’ Spice, Everything Nice

How does a franchise operation that turns out several thousand baked goods a week still make pies that taste and look homemade?

“We still bake our pies in small batches,” says Kaye Bass, president of Katie McGuire’s Pie and Bake Shoppe.

A “small batch” for Katie McGuire’s is 50 pies. While cream pies, lemon merengue and specialty and sugar-free pies are baked at the 22 individual stores in the network, most are assembled at the Huntington Beach commissary, where hundreds of pounds of sugar, flour, fruit and shortening are used to produce about 3,000 fruit pies weekly.

There are several tricks to making good pies, such as making them fresh every day and selling them only on the date they’re prepared, and not using preservatives or making them too sweet. But there is only one secret to successfully turning out consistently great pies: It’s all in the crust.

Using all-vegetable shortening, ice-cold water and minimally handling the dough results in flaky crusts. But there’s a trade-off. According to Bass, you can’t have both a pretty pie and a flavorful one, so Katie McGuire’s opts for optimum taste.

“Looks can be deceiving,” she says. “Starches and preservatives will make a pretty pie that will stand up taller, but you lose a lot of the flavor.”

Not that Katie McGuire’s pies don’t look appetizing. Fruit pies weigh a full three pounds, pecan pies use a pound of nuts, and the lemon in lemon merengue comes from freshly squeezed lemons.

After the pies are assembled, they are shipped chilled and unbaked to the group’s individual restaurants.

“Customers can purchase pies baked or, if they prefer, unbaked,” Bass says. “But when you take an unbaked pie home and bake it, it makes your kitchen smell wonderful, and you can really say: ‘I baked the pie.’ ”