Employee Thomas Hayes (left) gets the blueberry filling ready while co-owner Julie Albertson prepares the crusts. (Photo by Cyndy Slovak-Barton)
by CYNDY SLOVAK-BARTON
When Thanksgiving rolls around in Kyle, there are several employees and owners of Texas Pie Company who want to collapse.
After all, the baking frenzy heating up kitchens in most area homes, starts the week of Thanksgiving. Pies, cookies, cakes – all coming out of ovens in anticipation of visitors and family members.
But the kitchen heat is turned up at Texas Pie Company November 1 each year, as the staff prepares thousands of pies to be picked up locally or shipped throughout the country. Several weeks before the largest cooking holiday in the United States, employees stay until midnight, mixing ingredients from scratch. The next shift comes in at 6 a.m.
The baking cycle begins again. Mold the pie crusts, beat the eggs, make the filling, get the fruit and nuts mixed, fill the crusts, get them into the oven, seal them, pack them, ship them. The life cycle of a pie.
Co-owner Julie Albertson, who started in the pie business 27 years ago in Wimberley, moved to Kyle 12 years ago. Her pies can be recognized in restaurants throughout Austin and the region.
She has several women who have been with her for years, as they work side-by-side to mix up filling, placing it in five-gallon buckets in the refrigerator, so that Albertson, who makes each pie by hand, never has to leave her station during the rush.
Julie’s husband, Spencer Thomas, mans the phone, taking late orders this week, and longtime employees Thomas Hayes and Jesse Pison laugh through the motions, bobbing their heads to music that streams overhead. Michael Hagemann and Thomas Shears come in later in the day, manning the front counter and getting out orders as fast as possible.
By Wednesday afternoon, the team will have cooked more than 8,000 pies, with pecan, pumpkin and apple being the top sellers, in that order. The staff plans to cook until they can’t move any more, as experience shows from last year when they ran out of pies by 3 p.m. on Wednesday before Thanksgiving, that there will be a line out the door and down the sidewalk all day long.
When the doors close, the staff will take a welcome break, take a few days off, and begin their baking for the next holiday, only 32 days later.
BY THE NUMBERS:
• 4,200 10” pies baked since Nov. 1
• 4,000 3” pies baked since Nov. 1
• 900 pounds of flour used last week
• 300 pounds of flour arriving this week
• 2,050 pounds of sugar used since Nov. 1
• 256 individual orders for pickup Wednesday
• 32 restaurants ordering pies
