Just Desserts

5 Thanksgiving Pies That Break the Traditional Mold

Victory Garden's Pumpkin Pie
Victory Garden’s Pumpkin Pie Photo: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine

For those who dare to break the holiday-dessert stranglehold, a new array of pies to finish your feast with surprise endings that are frozen, Nutella-riddled, or prune-laced.

1. Victory Garden’s Pumpkin Pie in a Gingersnap Crust, $20 (pictured above)
Surprisingly refreshing and subtly tangy goat’s-milk ice cream is flavored with pumpkin and its attendant autumnal spices (allspice, mace, cinnamon), then packed into a gluten-free gingersnap-cookie crust.
31 Carmine St., nr. Bleecker St.; 212-206-7273; orders must be prepaid and require 24-to-48-hour advance notice.

Photo: Bobby Doherty


2. Breads Bakery’s Chocolate Babka Pie, $35
New York’s best chocolate babka turns into a chocolate-babka pie around the holidays.They make it by adding an extra layer of dough (not to mention more chocolate and Nutella), which crisps up and takes on a biscuity, cookielike texture when baked in a pie pan.
18 E. 16th St., nr. Union Sq. W.; 212-633-2253.

Photo: Bobby Doherty

3. Dominique Ansel Kitchen’s Honeycrisp Apple Blossom Tart, $50
Ansel upends apple pie’s customary selling points (soft-cooked fruit, homeyness) by constructing a meticulously whorled flower out of eight raw Honeycrisps sliced mille-feuille-thin and set in an apple-butter base. It’s as much corsage as dessert.
137 Seventh Ave. S., nr. Charles St.; 212-242-5111 or dominiqueanselkitchen.com/shop; orders require 48-hour advance notice.

Photo: Bobby Doherty

4. Ample Hills’ Walt and the Blackbirds Ice-Cream Pie, $52
Three pints of Nonna D’s brown-sugar-cinnamon-and-oatmeal-lace-cookie ice cream meet one Salty Honey pie on equally delicious terms. This is a first-time collaboration between Ample Hills Creamery and Four & Twenty Blackbirds pie shop, and since honey— let alone salty honey — doesn’t freeze, you don’t need a hammer and chisel to eat it. (Read more here.)
Available for preorder at amplehills.com, and pickup November 21 through 25 at Ample Hills locations in Gowanus and Prospect Heights.

Photo: Bobby Doherty

5. Runner & Stone’s Dried Plum Walnut Linzer Tart, $26
Peter Endriss’s cocoa-and-Kirschwasser-tinged fall version of the classic Austrian torte swaps walnuts for almonds and a prune filling for raspberry jam. The result is crumbly, not too sweet, perfect with coffee, and intended for grown-ups unafraid to call dried plums by their rightful name.
285 Third Ave., nr. Carroll St., Gowanus; 718-576-3360; orders require 48-hour advance notice.

*This article appears in the November 16, 2015 issue of New York Magazine.

5 Thanksgiving Pies That Break the Traditional Mold