Supersize your pies

When planning a holiday dinner, it’s often difficult to settle on a dessert. Pies are traditional, but if you have a large crowd gathering around your dinner table it can be a chore to make enough of them to ensure everyone gets a piece. There is a solution to this dilemma: slab pies. Forget about round pans and use a jelly roll pan instead. Sandwiching the filling of your choice between two sheets of pastry simplifies both pie making and serving. Slab pie also pleases crust lovers, as it often ends up with a higher crust-to-filling ratio than round pies. 

Slab pies aren’t just wonderful for dessert, either. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution describes a delicious kale and pomegranate slab pie that would be a stellar vegetarian main dish on your Thanksgiving or Christmas table. Since you can make the pie ahead and serve it at room temperature, it won’t compete with the turkey or sweet potato casserole for oven space. 

The EYB Library contains nearly 30 recipes for slab pie, including the Blueberry slab pie from  Everyday Food Magazine pictured above. You can also adapt most standard double-crust or crumb-topped pie recipes to the slab pie format. Keep in mind that the filling may ooze out if you double both the filling and crust recipes; you may want to make slightly less than twice the filling. Slab pies work best with fruit fillings or firm-set custards like pumpkin pie. If you want to make the pie look fancier, you can make a lattice top or use a small round cookie cutter to make polka-dots in the crust.