Alive & Unedited

Upper Crust

by Brian Lindamood

WILL SHILLING PHOTO

Ohio's finest homemade pies will battle for the blue ribbon this week at the State Fair. But you don't have to wait for fair season to get a slice of the best. Downtown's Tip Top Kitchen and Cocktails features homemade pies every night of the week, with a focus on local ingredients that would make fair fans proud.

Tip Top's treats are crafted by Carrie Rasmussen, who runs CarriePie from her Polaris-area home. A native of Fallsburg in Licking County, Rasmussen actually got her start at a fair. When she was about 12, she entered the Hartford Fair's Sweet Treats to Eat contest at the urging of her mother.

"I was more of a sewer, but my mom wanted me to make this Mississippi mud pie—she thought it would be fun for me to enter," she recalled. "And I won."

When she was in high school, Rasmussen worked at The Eatery, a diner in Newark where she found her favorite flavor, Lady Baltimore pie. "It's a cream pie and it's so rich—it has coconut and cherries and pineapple... It's absolutely delectable and it's definitely not good for the thighs," she laughed.

She now bakes two to four pies a day for Tip Top. It's her first professional baking gig, and the results are winning rave reviews from hungry diners. Strawberry-rhubarb, the most popular flavor, flies off the pie plate as fast as she can make it.

Rasmussen hopes to someday open her own little shop, the kind of place where you could sit at the counter and enjoy a shredded chicken sandwich, a cup of coffee and a slice of pie—pure and simple, just like her recipes.

How did you get hooked up with Tip Top?

When I read about this restaurant opening, I loved the concept—everything being from Ohio. And of course me being the biggest Ohio cheerleader, I e-mailed [owner Elizabeth Lessner] and told her how much I loved the concept and that I had won an award for baking.

It was just off the cuff. And she was like, "Come bake pies for me." So I started practicing—my husband was getting pie all the time. I just kept trying to perfect, perfect, perfect, and here we are.

Every pie is different, so I can't say they're all perfected, but I think it's a good product and I'm happy that she has my product here in her restaurant.

As with other dishes at Tip Top, your pies emphasize local ingredients. Does that make a big difference?

I think with any kind of tree-ripened fruit—versus things that are already frozen—you're going to get more of a natural, sugary flavor, where you don't have to use so much of the refined sugars. And it bakes up nicer.

It's sort of like drinking tea in a real china cup—some people swear they can taste the difference. I think you can taste the difference with the fresh fruit.

Where do you get your fruit?

This was a bad strawberry season [in central Ohio], so I had to buy those through a distributor. I have friends who grow rhubarb, and I'm planting my own.

The cherries are from Legend Hills Orchard... The raspberries I get from Carobeth Berry Farm in West Carlisle, near where I grew up. I'm going to these orchards and picking, and freezing so we can have some into the winter.

Pie seems kind of old-fashioned, yet timeless. Do think it could make a gourmet resurgence, like cupcakes and ice cream have?

It is a timeless dessert. I think the movie Waitress played a part in some of it coming back, but also with more people wanting to eat local, I think we are going back to more of the purist-type eating habits.

When you think about it, there are absolutely no byproducts in this. I don't use lard. Vegetable shortening is pretty much the most-processed product I would use. I think it's a very natural dessert, and it's an old American dessert that you can't go wrong with. It's great comfort food, that's for sure.

Do you have any advice for aspiring pie makers?

I would say to get your crust down, and be patient. There are a lot of elements involved, but you have to be able to work the dough and not get frustrated. Sometimes it might crumble and it needs a little bit of something. Everything else is very simple after that—easy as pie, so they say.

August 2nd, 2007

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