The Pie Guy

Pie is Stan Miyashiro’s cooking passion. Outside of pie, he makes nothing but ordinary guy food, barbecue and such. Pie is a remarkably abstract passion, though. He rarely eats pie himself.

But maybe that’s the key to his success. The one year he entered his pies at the L.A. County Fair, he took a first place and three seconds.

“He started baking pie because of me,” says Sandy Miyashiro, giggling at the memory in her Los Angeles living room. “When we were first married, I made him a pie, and it was awful. I haven’t baked a pie since.”

Stan simply resolved to find out how to make pie himself and went to his father to learn. Before the family moved to California in the early ‘60s, his father had run a restaurant in Honolulu called Sampa Inn. “It served steaks and seafood, things like that,” recalls Stan, “but every Thanksgiving [my father] would bake a couple of hundred pies. He wasn’t really set up for it--he had a little oven--and he could only bake two or three pies at a time. He worked for days.”

“People loved the pies,” says Sandy, whose own family was also in the restaurant business in Hawaii. “They made reservations in advance for Thanksgiving. A lot of them took pies home.”

Stan mastered pie-making and became the pie-maker not only in his own home but for his father’s now-closed L.A. restaurant, Walt’s, doing the annual hundreds of Thanksgiving pies. Then he seriously got into pie-making and started experimenting--inventing new pies, questing for pie perfection.

“When I was pregnant with my second child,” recalls Sandy, “he was making pie after pie. Every couple of hours, he’d wake me up and say, ‘Try this.’ I gained so much weight.”

Stan, a computer systems analyst, approaches pie in a thoughtful, systematic way. He reduces his concepts to scientific recipes with exact measurements.

Among his inventions are an apple pie with a Hawaiian touch of passionfruit juice and a lemon meringue pie with a secret method for producing an unusually moist, dense meringue. (We tried to get the secret but couldn’t talk him out of it.) His Hawaiian-style banana pie is not a banana cream but a straightforward fruit pie, using banana slices instead of apple slices.

He favors a very short pie dough, which keeps remarkably well, he says; friends visiting from Hawaii take packages of it home with them. On the other hand, he has nothing against supermarket frozen crust for a one-crust pie.

Jason Miyashiro, an athlete and personal trainer, was barely in grammar school at the peak of his father’s pie obsession. “I didn’t understand it at the time,” he says, “but now I see how much focus he had on what he did. I really admire that.”

DOUBLE-CRUSTED BANANA PIE

FILLING

8 large ripe bananas

3/4 cup sugar

Salt

3 tablespoons orange juice

3 tablespoons evaporated milk

3 tablespoons flour

CRUST

3 cups sifted flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon sugar

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons shortening

6 tablespoons cold water

ASSEMBLY

1 egg beaten with 1 teaspoon water

FILLING

Peel bananas, removing any residue left by skin. Cut into 1/2-inch slices and put in large mixing bowl. Add sugar, salt, orange juice, milk and flour. Toss lightly to coat but do not over-mix. Set aside.

CRUST

Combine flour, salt and sugar in mixing bowl. Cut in shortening with pastry blender or 2 knives until mixture is consistency of coarse oatmeal or tiny peas.

Sprinkle with water, 1 tablespoon at a time, tossing mixture lightly and stirring with fork. When adding water, be sure to sprinkle it on driest part of mixture. Dough should not be sticky but should hold together when pressed gently with fork.

ASSEMBLY

Form dough into smooth ball with hands. Divide in half. Roll out 1 dough half to fill in 10-inch-deep pie pan. Trim, with sharp knife, leaving about 1/4 inch extending over edge of pan.

Roll out top crust. Use cookie cutter to etch designs into dough (be careful not to cut through dough). Make slits around center of top crust for steam to escape during baking.

Mound banana mixture in bottom crust, using slotted spoon. Pour 3 tablespoons of residual liquid over filling and discard rest.

Brush edges of bottom crust with egg wash. Position top crust over pie and seal well, working from edge of pie farthest away from you, using lift-and-crimp motion toward center of pie. Brush top crust with egg wash.

Set pie on cookie sheet and bake at 425 degrees 10 minutes. Reduce heat to 350 degrees and bake until crust is golden, 35 to 40 minutes. Remove and set on wire rack to cool..

6 to 8 servings. Each of 8 servings:

625 calories; 348 mg sodium; 28 mg cholesterol; 31 grams fat; 83 grams carbohydrates; 7 grams protein; 0.71 gram fiber.

PUMPKIN COCONUT PIE

The coconut flavor is subtle, with just an extra hint of richness in a classic pumpkin pie.

5 eggs

1 (30-ounce) can pumpkin pie filling

1 cup dark brown sugar

1 cup granulated sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon ginger

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg

1 tablespoon pumpkin pie spice

1 cup coconut milk

2 1/2 cups evaporated milk

2 unbaked 10-inch pie shells

Beat eggs lightly in large bowl and add pumpkin pie filling, brown sugar, granulated sugar, salt, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, pie spice, coconut milk and evaporated milk. Mix until smooth.

Pour into pie shells. Place on cookie sheet and bake at 425 degrees 10 minutes, then reduce heat to 350 degrees until edge of pie begins to puff up, 40 to 45 minutes.

Remove pies immediately and cool on wire rack. Center may appear liquid, but pie will continue to cook. Serve cold.

12 to 16 servings. Each of 16 servings:

387 calories; 273 mg sodium; 73 mg cholesterol; 20 grams fat; 48 grams carbohydrates; 7 grams protein; 0.87 gram fiber.