Two days, 208 pies — and only eight hands to make it happen.
Karina Lira, the pastry chef at Harry’s Roadhouse, led a team of four through a record pie-making Thanksgiving season that brought sweet fulfillment to the tables of hundreds of families.
By the end of the two days, says Kathleen O’Brien, Harry’s owner, nearly every flat surface in the restaurant was covered with a cooling pie.
“Every table in the front room and the middle room … and the counter,” she says. “It smelled fantastic. We had to clear four shelves in the walk-in refrigerator.”
For Lira, who has been at Harry’s for about a half-dozen years, the Thanksgiving rush is just another crazy time of a crazy year that begins with President’s Day weekend. The full summer brings the numbers of tourists to a peak with Spanish Market, Folk Art Market, and Indian Market, and Lira even finds herself busy pounding out opera cake during opera season, which kicks off at the end of June.
Then there’s Balloon Fiesta before Thanksgiving, which means there’s rarely a quiet moment before the holidays begin.
But the hardest part of the job, Lira says, is making sure all the ingredients are ready to go on a regular basis.
“Just making sure we have enough dough, enough pie shells for the cold pies, making sure all the fillings are done,” she says. “After that, it’s not too bad. It’s waiting for them to cook and taking them out. I think what really takes the longest is getting them out of the oven.”
Baking has been a lifelong passion for Lira, who dresses in pink kitchen attire from head to toe. Growing up in Santa Fe, she began helping her mother make quinceañera and wedding cakes starting at about 5 years old. When she got to Harry’s, she spent several seasons learning her craft alongside former owner Peyton Young. Lira also spent two years in Santa Fe Community College’s Culinary Arts program, where she studied commercial baking, pastry presentation, and chocolate and sugar work.
The chef helps out during Thanksgiving’s frantic assembly process, but Lira says she usually has two people assisting her with the pie-making. Her team starts at about 5 a.m. and usually makes about 20 pies a day and about four or five different varieties.
“We’ll sit down with Kathleen a week before and decide what we’d like to do,” she says. “Once we walk in, we do the list, turn on the ovens, and start the morning. We’ll do anything we need for the morning — the batters and the muffins and the pizza dough — because we need to let them rise. And then we’ll move on to the pies, which are the biggest thing here. We make sure we roll out all the doughs, make the fillings, bake off the ones that take the longest.”
Does she have any favorites?
Lira loves to make layer cakes and singles out a love of chocolate above everything else.
“I like chocolate everything. Chocolate and raspberry,” she says. “Anything with lemon or fresh fruit is great. You can never go wrong with fresh fruit.”
Everything at Harry’s is made fresh, she says, including the apple pies, which begin with apples harvested from trees directly outside the restaurant. The apples get peeled, then cut and flavored to the team’s desire. The mixture sits for a day, and when Lira and her team come in the next day, they turn it into one of the restaurant’s signature desserts.
“We pre-portion all our dough,” she says. “It has to be made at least one day in advance so that it rests. Then we roll out circles, and we roll out the strips for whichever pies need strips. We make whatever fillings have to be made. Strawberry rhubarb or pecan filling.”
There are no secrets to baking, she says, and no ways to cut corners. For the coconut cream pie, for instance, she says you have to take the time to make sure the custard comes out smooth, and that means using a strainer. Her lemon meringue pie is probably her most complicated dessert, and it comes down to making sure that the filling is properly cooked.
“We whip the egg whites, and then we make our stabilizer, which is water, sugar, and cornstarch,” she says. “You cook that, and the meringue is whipping. Once the stabilizer is cooked, you slowly put it into the egg whites. You put the juice and the egg whites into the stabilizer; that’s your filling. The filling has to cook. It has to bubble. If it doesn’t bubble, the cornstarch didn’t activate.”
The lemon meringue pie, along with the coconut and chocolate cream, are the desserts that need to be pre-cooked; all the other pies cook with their filling and shell together.
The veteran baker says that even when she was young, her aunts would ask her what she did to make boxed brownies taste better than theirs. She says the main thing she did was read and follow the recipe. Her process now is mostly the same, although she’s baking for all of Santa Fe and not just family.
“Every time I make something, I try to do it with the most amount of love possible,” she says. “That’s my biggest and most creative ingredient, and I think it makes the pastries almost come to life. I try to put all my energy into it so when you bite into it, you have a burst of love.”