Comment by CrazyStat
15 hours ago
A friend of mine tries to bake a spherical pie for pi day (March 14) each year, with varying approaches (and levels of success).
15 hours ago
A friend of mine tries to bake a spherical pie for pi day (March 14) each year, with varying approaches (and levels of success).
I heard circles are also related to pi but have not had the time to confirm yet.
Sure would be a lot easier if we could just have “4 right angles”-day
Pies are more of a Tau day thing https://www.tauday.com
That's a pi-ty
There are some old 18th century pies they cooked in boiling water inside a bag which could be quite spherical. Townsends on youtube has some videos on it.
Isn’t that essentially a stuffed pudding? Or do some use pie dough
From what I understand many of the pie doughs of the period were the same thing as pudding dough, everyone had a pot to boil stuff in and it was just extra if you had an oven and pie pans, sometimes with noted cooking times for a pan at the end. The that era of American cooking kind of blends puddings and pies so that they mean basically the same thing. Similar someone making a pan fried rice recipe today and just adding on the end of the recipe if you are fancy and own an actual wok you can adjust cooking times for that.
The first two things that spring to mind are pasties from the UK (which are not usually spherical but can get quite hemispherical), and the "UFO-Döner" from Germany (which are more oblate spheroids). Maybe by combining these ideas, your friend can get closer to their dream?
Beef Wellington could be spherical if you so chose.
I suspect that deep-fried-battered haggis might exist which could be very spherical.
British steak and kidney pudding (a steamed pie of suet pastry) is a truncated cone shape, could go spherical with the right pastry case.
A truncated cone is called a "frustrum" which always seemed fitting to me.
> A friend of mine tries to bake a spherical pie for pi day (March 14) each year, with varying approaches (and levels of success).
Could also do it on pi approximation day (July 22), then one doesn't have to be so exact about it.
Now I'm considering making a Matt Parker pie: a spherical pie made from a normal pie + calling it close enough in 2 out of 3 dimensions.
I didn't get it, so I looked it up.
22/7 ~= 3.14
Actually closer to π and matches the more sensible date format.
(Yes this is worth fighting over!)
355 / 113
( = 3.1415929204 )
is one approximation I have read about, attributed by some, to ancient or medieval Indian or Chinese mathematicians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximations_of_pi
I wonder if they could look to dim sum for inspiration? A apple dumbling is basically just a round apple pie right?
Heating the middle has to be a pain. And cutting it…
I’m pretty sure that the state of the art right now is firing the pastries on a ballistic arc in hard vacuum and hitting them mid-trajectory with a laser pulse to cook them through.
Well if you insert metal rods through it you can help with the heat transfer, then you can lattice over the holes. If you pumpkin pie it, you might even be able to have it hold up under its own weight. Plus a bit of stiff whipped cream in the holes would help.
I would make them fairly small (personal pie-sized) and use a filling that doesn't need to be cooked in the oven to set. The main limiting factors, I think, would be structural integrity and heating the filling to the center. You could set it on a ring (like the rim of a spring-form pan) to support it better during cooking. Now, a four dimensional hyper pie, on the other hand...
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A pie like this, to the face of a problematic politician, would add drama and help resurrect the profile of pies as activists!
One could always precook the filling.