Hoosier Mama Pie Company
Paula Haney began jonesing for a pie–good old-fashioned, homemade apple pie–while working in the pastry kitchen at Trio under Grant Achatz, the wunderkind chef who now runs Alinea. Achatz was developing his style of whiz-bang molecular gastronomy, and although Haney loved her job–she calls it both thrilling and terrifying–it deepened her desire for something simple.
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She started developing recipes on her own, and in the fall of 2005, after a few years of serious baking and consumption, Haney and her husband, skilled apple peeler Craig Siegelin, founded Hoosier Mama Pie Company, baking at Kitchen Chicago, the shared-use kitchen in Ravenswood Manor. Painstakingly made–the double-crust apple takes three hours–a Hoosier Mama pie has the taste of something bygone, something you’d given up wanting. The pies, which cost between $18 and $21, are now sold at a half-dozen Chicago cafes and at the Green City Market (which starts up May 16); for varieties and locations, see hoosiermamapie.com. They’re also available by bike messenger, secured inside a cart made in Indiana by the Amish.
She learned fast: after a year or so she enrolled in the pastry program at Kendall College only to leave the school after landing the job at Trio. “I just got too busy,” she says. Haney was Trio’s pastry chef for six years. When chef Shawn McClain left to open Spring and was replaced by Achatz, she was the only employee who stayed on besides owner and front-of-the-house manager Henry Adinaya. “I said they kept me on because I was the only person who knew where anything was. But then they moved everything.” Finally, after years of six-day work weeks–“a 12-hour day was a luxury–that was a short day,” she says–Haney left. She worked for a year or so at Pili Pili and less than a year at Trotter’s to Go before launching Hoosier Mama. “Timewise I figured it couldn’t be any worse,” she says.
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