Mt. Pleasant Township farm’s desserts popular on many area Thanksgiving tables
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While turkey usually grabs the most attention at the Thanksgiving table, the dessert pie isn’t far behind.
For 23 years, pies from Sand Hill Berries farm off Route 819 in Mt. Pleasant Township have been stealing the show.
The work for owners Susan and Richard Lynn begins several weeks ahead of the holiday as advance orders begin trickling in. By the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, which is the deadline for pie orders, the trickle turns into a full-bore flood of requests, said Bobbitt Miller, the Lynns’ niece-in-law, who helps at the store.
“We take a lot of pride that the pies we bake here are like the homemade pies people remember from home,” Susan Lynn said.
Most of the orders come from within 45-minutes driving distance from Mt. Pleasant, but the market also ships its double-crusted pie offerings.
In addition to the market’s usual pie offerings — raspberry, blackberry, blueberry, bumbleberry and cherry — it also offers special creations during the holiday season. Those include raspberry cranberry walnut, applesauce pecan mini pies, pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin pecan cranberry bread and this year’s newcomer, an amaretto kahlua almond cheesecake.
“But our bestseller at Thanksgiving is, of course, the pumpkin pie,” she said.
And, like Sand Hill’s other pie offerings where the fruits and berries are picked at the farm, the pumpkins, or in this case, squashes, are homegrown.
“We don’t grow the Halloween jack-o-lantern pumpkins — they tend to be very bitter. We use the hubbard squash … the same pumpkins our grandmothers used as pie pumpkins, and we also grow New England pie pumpkins and some Cinderella pumpkins,” she said.
Among the hundreds of advance orders, Lynn said more than 200 requests are received annually for the pumpkin pies. She noted that customers will find the farm’s pumpkin pies “much lighter in color” due to the bakers using cream and not as many dark spices that usually are in the canned pumpkin.
“We wait as late as possible to to harvest our pumpkins to get them as ripe as possible,” she said.
After harvesting, the pumpkins are put into convection ovens at 320 degrees “to get them soft to the touch.” They are then skinned, strained and processed on site using 5-gallon plastic buckets as strainers to remove leftover skin, seeds and seed pieces.
The pie shell crusts are homemade and baked ahead on site.
To deliver the pies “as fresh as possible,” the Lynns begin their pie baking Tuesday afternoon before Thanksgiving.
“We don’t use any preservatives,” she said.
Susan Lynn pointed out, even after 20 years of mass pie production, the pumpkin-stained family recipe is kept at arm’s length during the entire process so nothing is forgotten or left out.
The baking usually goes into the early morning hours.
“I think we were working until about 3 a.m. last year,” she said.
Miller noted that “a few” extra pies are made.
“We have some people who call and say they promised their family they would supply the pies, but forgot to order,” she said.