Our PieFest & Contest is back!
Good Food
KCRW
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 February 2026
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Plus: A powerful pie documentary, Puerto Rican party food, a loverly chocolate tart, the best Mexican restaurants, and hydroponic tomatoes at the farmers market.
- KCRW's PieFest & Contest is back! We talk to Iowan Beth Howard about her documentary Pieowa, which brings together church ladies, state fair contestants, farm wives, and historians to explore the power of a flaky crust.
- Mia Castro transports herself to Puerto Rico with inspired dishes for Sunday's Super Bowl halftime show featuring Bad Bunny.
- Psychotherapist and Ottolenghi Test Kitchen recipe developer Helen Goh incorporates baking into a meaningful life.
- L.A. Taco's Memo Torres finds time to help compile the city's best Mexican restaurants.
- At her Highland Park gastropub, chef Debbie Lee incorporates farmers market produce into creative bar snacks.
Connect with Good Food host Evan Kleiman on Substack.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From KCRW, I'm Evan Klyman and this is Good Food. I have three words for you. |
| 0:07.6 | Pie is back. KCRW's Pie Fest and Contest returns next month on March 14th, aka Pie Day. |
| 0:17.5 | That's P-I as in the number 3.14. And to kick off Good Foods pie season, we knew we |
| 0:25.0 | wanted to talk to another pie obsessive. Beth Howard is unique, however, a pie baker and |
| 0:32.4 | author who has used the pastry to create community. She's produced written and directed Paiowa, a feature documentary |
| 0:40.3 | about Iowa and pie. Hi. Hi, Evan. I love so much how the film opens with the visual of the |
| 0:49.6 | Malibu coastline and your voice over narration saying that you applied for a job in Malibu as a pie |
| 0:57.7 | maker and when they asked for your experience you said I'm from Iowa and that got you the job |
| 1:06.6 | that's right true story that was Malibu kitchen up inibu, and I was their resident pie baker for a year. |
| 1:15.5 | And I had just come off of a dot-com job in San Francisco, and I was so burned out from sitting behind a computer, you know, 12 hours a day. |
| 1:23.7 | And I just said I told my bosses, I wanted to go do something with my hands like make pie. |
| 1:28.2 | And the next thing you know, be careful what comes out of your mouth. |
| 1:31.8 | Sometimes it manifests and comes true. |
| 1:34.0 | So yeah, there I was making pie for minimum wage in Malibu. |
| 1:37.9 | So that definitely shaped my life going forward. |
| 1:42.0 | Yeah, I always love hearing how people come to make pie part of their identity. |
| 1:48.2 | Where did it start for you? |
| 1:50.4 | My dad loved pie. |
| 1:51.5 | I guess it just goes all the way back to the beginning. |
| 1:53.8 | And that's one of the things I learned in the film interviewing everybody. |
| 1:56.7 | You know, everyone talks about, oh, my grandma made pie, my mom, you know, whatever, pie reminds us of somebody we love. And my dad loved banana cream pie. And so it always kind of had a special place in my life. And then when I was 17, I was biking down the West Coast and got caught stealing apples from somebody's orchard. And I was on a bicycle. I wasn't taking, you know, crates of apples. |
| 2:23.4 | It was just a couple of apples. And this old man storms out of his house. And he turns out to be a retired pastry chef from the merchant marines. And he invited us into his house and taught us how to make |
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