In-your-face pie fest was a slice

In spite of the mild sun-stroke I incurred dur­ing the swel­ter­ing after­noon heat at a recent coun­try pie fes­ti­val, it was all worth it. It hap­pened in a lush field at the lovely McCully’s Hill Farm located a short drive from my part-time home of Strat­ford, Ont.

Here, I wit­nessed my first pie-eating con­test up close and per­sonal, some­thing I would not have thought would be any fun until I expe­ri­enced it. In gen­eral, I’m against eat­ing com­pe­ti­tions which I find gross and unap­pe­tiz­ing, espe­cially when peo­ple are ram­ming hot dogs or spaghetti with meat­balls down their gul­lets. How­ever, eat­ing one pie — and that was the chal­lenge in this case — does not seem over-the-top. To boot, pies have a rep­u­ta­tion as an in-your-face food (remem­ber Jean Chre­tien) and are among my favourite foods both to make and eat.

There were sev­eral eat­ing styles among the six con­tes­tants: the two-handed approach, the full pie-in-the-face modus operandi, the one-handed scoop and even a drink-the-filling style adopted by one fel­low whose blue­berry pie was quite runny.

The win­ner was Mike Beik, a reporter for the Bea­con Her­ald, who explained his suc­cess thus: “I shov­elled it in as fast as I could with one hand.” Another com­peti­tor had done research on the topic and claimed that eat­ing a lit­tle and drink­ing some water is a good pre-contest strat­egy to stretch the stomach.

In their faces

I was one of four judges assigned the pleas­ant task of judg­ing 13 home-made pies, at least half of which were above aver­age and two of which were superb.

The win­ner was Tina Van­heuvel, lovely wife of Antony John and part­ner in their organic farm called Soiled Rep­u­ta­tion located on the out­skirts of Strat­ford in Sebringville. Her old-fashioned, clas­sic peach pie was noth­ing short of sub­lime, Melt-in-the-mouth, flaky pas­try encas­ing lus­ciously juicy peaches. More proof that sweet and sim­ple is often best.

Tricks from Tina. She uses a lard pas­try. For the fill­ing, she tosses 5 cups of sliced peaches with ²⁄₃ cup sugar, 2 tbsp flour, 2 tsp lemon juice, ¹⁄₄ tsp almond extract and a pinch of salt. Before bak­ing, she brushes the top crust with cream, then sprin­kles it with sugar and bakes the pie at 450F for 15 min­utes, then for about 30 min­utes or until golden brown at 350F.