Anne BralyChristine Nguyen is an expert at baking pies. She sells her creations at Plus Coffee in St. Elmo, Bread & Butter bakery in Red Bank and at Chattanooga Market on Sundays, as well as online at mamacrunkspies.com. But pie baking wasn't always in the stars for Nguyen.
"I'm Vietnamese, and pies aren't a big thing in my culture," she says. "Plus, my family were not really bakers at all."
So she taught herself, beginning at an early age, before enrolling in culinary school at the Art Institute of Washington, where "I learned a little bit about making pies," she says.
After her 2011 graduation from culinary school, she dabbled in the Washington, D.C., restaurant industry, working as a line cook at Source, one of Wolfgang Puck's restaurants, and at a bar/music club in Arlington, Va. She also worked as manager of Crepe, a D.C. food truck, and at a Whole Foods Washington location as a catering liaison.
Eventually, though, she began concentrating in one area: cooking pastries in fine dining restaurants including Founding Farmers, a farm-to-table eatery in D.C. Suffice it to say, food is her world. And two years ago, after she and her husband visited Chattanooga as tourists, they moved back as residents.
"We were just taken with the city," she says.
Lucky for local pie lovers. In 2016, she made her debut at Chattanooga Market as Mama Crunk's Pies, a name that hearkens back to her days in college.
"I got the nickname 'Crunk' in college from a bandmate in my first band," Nguyen tells. "It was shortened from 'Crunkstine.' If you look up Crunk in an urban dictionary, it basically means someone who enjoys the life of the party."
The name stuck and, after giving birth to a daughter, she added Mama to the name, "since I am also now a motherly figure who loves to cook for everyone," she says.
She also enjoys sharing her knowledge and offers these tips for successful pie baking.
* Use high-quality ingredients, especially in regard to the fat. If you have an all-butter dough recipe, splurge on the good stuff - European butter that has the higher-fat content. If you prefer lard, use good-quality lard.
* Make sure your ingredients are very cold at the start. The flaky crust from a pie comes from cold, distinctive chunks of butter melting into flaky layers. "I like to freeze my butter after I dice it into cubes to ensure a good dough texture, and I make sure the water I add is ice-cold," she says.
* Learn to look at and feel your dough. A recipe will tell you nothing if you don't start to recognize when a dough is too dry or wet. It's always better to err on the side of a drier dough since it's easier to add more moisture to a dough. If the dough is too wet, there will be shrinkage from the pan.
* Prebake your pie shell for custard pies. Crusts cook at a higher temperature than custard filling, so you will risk curdling the custard at the higher temperature. Also, if you don't put pie weights on the crust before baking the filling, the crust will shrink.
* Don't waste your money on expensive pie weights. Just save a container of dry beans to reuse over and over.
* Make sure that your fruit fillings are not too wet. "On the whole, I prefer to cook my fruit fillings in a pan on the stove to ensure that they don't get too weepy and liquidy while baking. While cooking, I thicken my fillings with cornstarch or arrowroot prior to baking. That also speeds up the entire baking time."
Nguyen sells eight kinds of pies - six sweet, two savory - and changes out the flavors according to the season or customers' requests. A customer favorite is this fresh blueberry pie.
Mama Crunk's Blueberry Lavender Vanilla Pie
For the crust (makes double crust):
20 tablespoons butter (2 1/2 sticks), diced into cubes and then chilled
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour (plus more for rolling dough)
1/2 teaspoon salt
4-6 tablespoons ice water
For the filling:
2 1/2 cups blueberries, divided
1 tablespoon water
3/4 cup sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch
2 teaspoons lemon juice
1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract
2-4 drops essential lavender oil (therapeutic grade only, see note)
1 egg white combined with 1 tablespoon water
Coarse sugar for sprinkling
For crust: Place chilled butter, flour and salt into a food processor or bowl. If using a food processor, pulse to combine roughly (there will still be big chunks). If using a bowl, cut butter into dry ingredients with forks or a pastry cutter until you have pea-size chunks. Gradually add ice water by tablespoons (while pulsing in a processor, adding by hand if in a bowl) until the dough has just achieved the texture of wet sand. Form into a disk, wrap in plastic and chill in refrigerator for at least 30 minutes.
For filling: In small saucepan, combine 1 cup of blueberries, water, sugar and cornstarch, and heat over medium heat, stirring occasionally. Let mixture come to a boil, and reduce to a simmer for 5-7 minutes or until slightly thick. Remove from heat, and add lemon juice, vanilla and lavender oil. Allowing to cool slightly, then add remaining 1 1/2 cups blueberries.
To assemble: Heat oven to 400 degrees. Remove dough from refrigerator, and allow to sit out for 5 minutes. Divide the dough into half and shape each half into circles. Start rolling one half, rotating in quarter turns so that dough rolls out evenly. Roll to 1/8-inch thickness and place into a 9-inch pie pan, trimming off excess dough with kitchen shears but leaving about a 1-inch overhang. Brush the overhang with egg-white mixture.
Place cooled blueberry filling into pie pan, and cover the top with lattice strips or cutouts rolled from second half of dough. Tuck the bottom crust over the top and crimp edges to seal, leaving slits in the top of a decorative cutout for steam to escape from.
Using a pastry brush, brush egg-white wash over the top of the pie, and sprinkle evenly with sugar. Place pie on a cookie sheet and bake in 400-degree oven 25-30 minutes or until golden brown.
Note: Lavender oil can be found at stores such as Whole Foods and Earth Fare; also online at amazon.com.
Contact Anne Braly at abraly@timesfreepress.com.