[TheForge] Pie press

[Bob Ehrenberger]

Mike,

When I was in school I worked in the kitchen to pay my room and board.

We had a pie press and that was one of my jobs. It was set up to make 
individual pies, more like tarts.  I don't think our dies were heated, after 
the shells were formed they were put on a tray, filled, and baked. I think 
we served 3k to 5k meals a day so we had to crank out a lot of little pies.

Robert Ehrenberger
Shelbyville, Mo.
eforge at centurytel.net

---Original message----

I thought about that.  I have a pie press [1] that goes through the
right motions but it doesn't have bearings to take that kind of
beating.  Peggy suggested using the 300# air hammer just to taunt
me. :-)


- Mike



[1] Right, pie press.  I blew 20 bucks on it at a junk yard just so I
    could take it home and see what it was.  It seems to have been an
    idea of the aluminum company (Kaiser Dial-O-Matic) back in the
    early 50s, I guess as a way to introduce those disposable foil pie
    pans.  The operator pops a pie pan into an electrically heated
    tray shaped like a pie pan, tosses in a ball of pie dough and
    turns the manual crank.  An electrically heated matching die comes
    down and squidges the dough into a thin shell.  Pop out the man
    and do another.  Has a rotating head (like a turret lathe?) to
    accommodate up to three different dies.  The lower die is
    quick-change, too.  Upped pie shell production from a few an hour
    to a couple of hundred hundred.  Now an antique because that stuff
    is now fully automated.

    - Proud Pie Press Owner

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~.
                                                           /V\
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^