Walnut & Oat Slab Pie

Trigger warning: This post discusses topics relating to eating disorders. 

Overall, Saturday was fine but not great. Baking has become my primary method of procrastination, so I had a ton of things from throughout the week that I needed to get through. I got a lot of these things done on Saturday, but not everything I had hoped. Additionally, I started to feel a little conflicted about this project. I've talked about my complicated relationship with eating in a few of my previous reviews, but I really felt its full effects yesterday. When I first quit my job, I really tried to focus on eating intuitively, but since I've gotten more involved with this project and become more surrounded by desserts on a convenient, day to day basis, I've found that hard to control. I still regularly weigh myself, just to check that I can physically afford to eat the amount of food I am. When I weighed myself yesterday, I was at 144 - several pounds higher than what I was when I started this project. I know it's silly, but that dampened my mood a little. It was a little wake-up call to me that yes, eating everything I bake will indeed make me gain weight, no way of going around it. This is probably a healthier weight for me to be at anyway - still teetering on the edge of underweight, but not as bad as the 130s - but it's hard for me to let go of that mindset that thinner isn't always better. I still very much see my body in a warped way, and I try to shape it with the goal of looking "artistic" and desirable to others. I know I shouldn't be doing that, but I just can't help it. I had already eaten two out of nine pieces of this walnut and oat slab pie before weighing myself. Later that evening, I ate a third piece over the toilet, spitting each bite out of my mouth when I felt like I had chewed enough that it felt like it was actually going into my body. I used to do this occasionally, but never that often - it was just too gross. Now I'm really afraid I'm going to start throwing up again. That's the thing about eating disorders - they're often depicted in the mainstream as being a very glamorous thing, you know, the model who weighs barely 100 pounds and eats salad for every meal. Of course, there are cases like that, and they're very deceptively ugly ones, but I think most people with eating disorders can attest to them being just plain ugly and gross most of the time. As for the rest of the pie, I wrapped it in plastic, stored it somewhere out of the way, and haven't touched it since. 

I'm sorry for dumping all of that out right at the beginning. I know I'm supposed to be talking about these recipes and my experiences making them. This is a Walnut & Oat Slab Pie from What's for Dessert. It contains of a gooey filling of toasted walnuts and oats flavored with some maple syrup and cinnamon, and it's called a "slab pie" because it's baked in a 9x13 pan in a rectangular shape (as usual, I halved the recipe and baked it in an 8x8). The inspiration for this pie, according to Claire's headnote, comes from a bowl of oatmeal with cinnamon and maple syrup on top as well as a traditional pecan pie. I'm sure I've had pecan pie before in my life, but it's not something I eat regularly, so I don't have a solid perception of what it's supposed to taste like, or what makes a particularly good version. Oatmeal, however, is one of the things that I have had several times in my life despite not really being a fan of it (you eat whatever your mom makes you for breakfast, regardless of how much you like it). It just tastes very plain, beige, and mushy to me, and no amount of cinnamon or brown sugar on top can remedy that. So I kind of anticipated that I wouldn't be blown away by this pie, but it still seemed basic and inoffensive enough to not hate eating.

Claire has a flaky pastry dough recipe in both of her books. Since I made the Dessert Person version for the All Allium Quiche, and I'm quite familiar with it, I decided to follow the method she has in What's for Dessert to compare. The ratio of ingredients is pretty much the same, but the technique is slightly different. In the Dessert Person recipe, half of the butter gets crumbled by hand into the flour mixture, while the other half is sliced into thin sheets, chilled, and flattened by hand. In the What's for Dessert recipe, all of the butter is sliced, chilled, and tossed in the flour mixture before everything is dumped onto a work surface and chopped with a bench scraper before incorporating together (I don't have a bench scraper, so I used my very dull knife. I know, very unprofessional). This particular method might work better for people who have hot hands or are afraid of getting their hands in the dough for whatever reason, but to be honest, I didn't notice a particular difference in the final crusts of both versions. I'll probably stick to the original version, because the new method just seemed a little fussy and complicated, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Plus, I find the practice of smooshing the butter by hand to be very fun and therapeutic.

The filling starts with some toasted walnuts and oats. I actually had to toast some more walnuts because my first batch got a little too dark in the oven. The recipe says 7-10 minutes, but I would err on the lower side. For some reason, the nuts get toasted at 400 degrees (as opposed to 350 like I've seen in most recipes), so that could be why. It ended up being fine. More oats then get browned on the stovetop along with some butter before heavy cream is added, creating a porridgy mixture. Like I said, I am not a big oatmeal person, so the look of the filling at this stage wasn't super appetizing to me. Luckily, a ton of other things are added, like eggs, sugar, maple syrup, and cinnamon, and the filling definitely came to resemble something similar to pecan pie. 

Because this is a pretty liquidy filling, the crust gets parbaked beforehand. Like I said, I halved the recipe, but I still wasn't sure how much pie dough I would end up needing. I ended up using pretty much all of what I had made. Interestingly, though, I found that the edges of the pie crust were much taller than the filling. I also noticed a similar issue with the quiche I made, so maybe I'm misinterpreting the directions for pie crust somewhere or that's just how it's designed to be. I noticed in the picture in the book that the pan used looks much shallower than the one I have, so that could definitely be a factor. It's difficult at times to adjust a recipe to the equipment you have on hand, especially when you're scaling up or down, but I would rather take the risk then end up having to eat a giant 9x13 pie all by myself. I already have too much leftover dessert lying around from this project; I don't need more. I was also a little disappointed with how I crimped the pie dough - the dough didn't really extend all the way to the rim, but I also thought that rolling it any further would make it too delicate, so I ended up with crimps that were a little uneven and half-assed, but it's okay. To be honest, I wasn't really fully immersed in the baking spirit on Saturday, and I think that rubbed off a little on this pie.

Overall, this was a very nice pie. Its flavors felt decidedly autumnal (ironic, since I'm making it in March), but it uses seasonally agnostic ingredients, so it can really work for any time of year. It's a good option for when there isn't really any fresh fruit in season, or simply for people who aren't huge fans of fruit pies (couldn't be me). The crust was really nicely browned on the bottom from parbaking, and the filling had a really nice flavor from the toasting of the walnuts and oats as well as the maple and cinnamon (although those last two ingredients mostly help to accentuate the walnuts and oats rather than overpower them). I was a little surprised with the texture of the filling - as I mentioned before, the last time I had pecan pie was probably ages ago, and I was expecting something a little more like a caramel, but the filling had more of a custardy texture. Not bad by any means, just unexpected. This pie is very lightly sweetened - I'd say significantly less so than a typical pecan pie, if I'm correctly imagining what a typical pecan pie tastes like. This meant that there was a pretty prominent "oaty" taste to the pie, which I honestly didn't love. It almost veered into healthy/granola territory - fine, but not what I'm looking for in a dessert. Overall, I have nothing particularly bad to say about this pie, but it also didn't have the wow factor for me.

verdict: 7/10

would I make again? probably not