Pieometry: Modern Tart Art and Pie Design for the Eye and the Palate

by Lauren Ko

The pie-making genius behind the popular Instagram account @lokokitchen reveals the secrets of her mind-blowing creations in this gorgeous cookbook illustrated with more than 100 full-color photographs.

In a matter of years, Lauren Ko made all hell bake loose, going from novice pie baker to internet star and creator of today’s most surprising and delightful pie and tart designs. Her unique geometric style uses fruit and dough cut and woven into stunning shapes to highlight color and texture. With an elegant symmetry that matches their knockout flavor, her dazzlingly intricate and inventive designs look difficult to produce, but can be achieved with little more than a knife, ruler, and some patience.

In Pieometry, Lauren reveals her secrets, sharing stories about her designs and the inspiration behind them. Warm and funny, she recounts the spectacular piesasters that led to some of her best creations, and breaks down her most beautiful designs, describing how to make naturally-colored dough, intricate weaves, and striking cut-out patterns. Pieometry provides clear, step-by-step instructions, accompanied by helpful photographs, which any patient baker can follow to build these pies from bottom crust to top in their own kitchens. Lauren makes it easy to mix and match doughs, fruits, fillings, and designs, and each recipe includes suggestions for alternative ingredients. Best of all, the beautiful finished pie and tart photos are just as much of a treat to look at as the pies are to eat. But even if you make a mistake here and there, her flavors save the day!

When it comes to flavor, Pieometry offers a balance of sweet and savory pies that are a feast for the senses, including:

Of a Shingle Mind: Honey ricotta tart with an herbed pastry shell and beets
Berried Treasure: Lavender blackberry cream with a shortbread crust and berries
Wave of Wonders: Cardamom coffee cream with a shortbread crust and pear
Once in a Tile: Pumpkin black sesame pie with a black sesame crust
C and Easy: Butternut bacon macaroni and cheese pie with a whole wheat cheddar chive crust
Squiggle Room: Grilled cinnamon pineapple pie with a basic butter crust

Whether you want to impress at the holidays or just spruce up a family meal, Pieometry is your guide to transforming a rustic traditional dessert into a modern masterpiece. 

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Food, Nonfiction, Reference, Art, Design

208 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 13, 2020

Reviews

[Meg Platypus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Came for the pies and pictures... stayed for the puns.

[Hannah Dalpiaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

No matter what your level of baking experience there is something for you in this book!
Lauren sets you up to feel confident executing her designs, but also to start to experiment on your own!

You don't need fancy equipment and most designs can be created with just a ruler and knife!
Even if you aren't ready to jump into making your own dough (I promise, Lauren walks you through it all!) You could still utilize the design inspiration to style a store bought pie or use a store bough freezer crust and make the filling.

I also love that even though design is at the center the FLAVORS are incredible! Ranging from pumpkin with black tahini to PB mousse to lox and everything bagel! Lauren comes up with killer flavor combos, which also create a great starting point for you to use your own imagination to continue to explore new flavor combos if you want.

Lauren also has a knack for storytelling, so even if you don't want to bake a single thing from the book you can still enjoy this as a work of stories and art! You will not be disappointed to have this on your cookbook shelf!

[Jennifer Worrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is so much to love about this book. The artistry is beautiful, the recipes are unusual—even the classics have a twist. This self-proclaimed Pie Lady is pleased, especially with the Everything Bagel Tart Crust. I see myself making many many pies and getting very fat. And I finally got my husband to eat beets, so thank you, Lauren Ko, fellow beet un-enthusiast!

[Miss Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is definitely going to take a bit of extra work to make the crust designs or decorate with the geometric patterns, but you can also use the recipes and make simpler designs if you'd prefer. Lauren Ko's years of experience with pie will serve you well in taste and baking just as much as in artistically presenting your pie.

Much of the book is actually a choose your own pie adventure! You can mix and match many of the shells/crusts and fillings.

Among my favourites to work with were:

Basic Shortbread Crust
Funfetti Oreo Crust
Speculoos Cookie Crust
Everything (But The) Bagel Pastry Shell
Matcha Green Tea Tart Pastry Shell
Pink Lemonade Curd
Cranberry Curd
Truth or Square (pie and design)
Spiced Coffee Cream
Gingerbread Caramel
Peanut Butter Mousse
Chocolate Hazelnut Ganache
Strawberry Mango Passion Fruit Pie
Bluebarb*
Potato, Onion, and Porter Cheddar Filling in Herbed Pastry Shell

[Pearse Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I interviewed Ko in an Epicurious roundtable surrounding the release of this book, read here: https://www.epicurious.com/shopping/t...

This is a wild, neon cookbook: few people had made pies Ko before she started to perfect her modernist, geometric technique, and now she's showing you all her secrets and techniques in one of the most beautiful books of the year, cookbook or not. She's also a self-taught baker who shops at Costco, just like me! She doesn't want to make super complicated stuff because she doesn't work that way. The combinations here are fucking brilliant. Matcha, butterfly pea powder, and carrot juice in THE CRUST. Fillings made with edible flowers, plum/basil, miso/white carrot, short rib/tomatillo, cardamom/coffee cream, lemongrass/grapefruit curd, are you fucking kidding me? I want all of these now. Christ. One note is that the ingredients can get complicated/expensive (which Costco is she going to?) with stuff like dragonfruit or tons of fresh herbs. These pies are exquisite and perfect gifts, though, and her techniques really outline how to make even the most complex work. Also, the photography is just next-level.

Notable recipes include:
32 Happy as a Gram
41 Life of the Tarty
44 Truth or Square
50 Livin’ on a Pair
54 Secret Ingradient
65 Spike a Pose (black tea panna cotta)
100 Easy on the I’s
103 A Green Slate
140 Herb Appeal

[Tracy]

Fun, intricate designs that take far more patience than I have to construct. A fair number of recipes in here as well as decoration instructions -- some bold sounding flavor combos, both savory and sweet. Many of the designs are quite colorful; I appreciate that the colors seem to come from food rather than dyes, though some ingredients (e.g. specific varieties of fruit I'd never encountered before) sounded challenging to source. I think her decorations especially shine on the tarts, where the fruit is added after baking, but there were some neat patterns with the pies too. As added fun, each recipe seems to have a punny or clever name.

[Karol K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Photography is beautiful and so many pie crust recipes. I am in awe.

If you are into tart making, this is your book!!!

Thank you for your amazing creativity. If I did not know better I'd say you lived in Portland, Oregon, the crazy art capitol of the West.

[Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love this book and the journey of the author. I wondered if they could be recreated and discovered that yes they can be.

[Amber · Rating 3 out of 5]

The recipes look yummy and the designs are pretty but I wouldn't take the time to make the intricate designs.

[Kjersti · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was fun to look through and read about the author who started out as an instagrammer who had just lost her job so started baking and morphed into this pie genius.

[Tricia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got this book because I heard an interview with the author and I like making pie. Her creations are works of art, geometric art. In addition to the gorgeous pies, there is a whole section of basics, such as various colored crusts. But to be honest, I don't know that I'll ever make any of them, because the presentation is a bit intimidating. I would likely fall short and end up with something destined for the pie equivalent of Cake Wrecks!

[Onceinabluemoon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very clever baking, not my style, but food as art has its merits!

[Dani]

What a gorgeous and stunning book!

There are a wide variety of tarts and pies in this book, and the author, Lauren Ko, promises that even if you feel intimidated, you'll find the recipes surprisingly doable. After all, she is not a professional baker either, and she got her start with the most basic of kitchen tools.  (But you will need patience if you want to copy her artistry!)

Every design is explained and laid out step-by-step.  The designs are visually impressive, yet accessible and doable when you know the technique and how the steps are broken down.  But this is most definitely not just a decorating book-- there are a wide variety of flavors and recipes that this book has to offer.  It has everything from sweet to savory, and some mouthwatering flavor combos.  You might also find something new! 

For example, you've maybe heard of a tomato tart, but what about a tart that embodies a lox and bagel platter?  The "No Rings Attached" begins with a tart shell based on an everything bagel, filled with cream cheese, salmon, red onion, and all the accompanying flavors and herbs, topped with a gorgeous and colorful variety of heirloom tomatoes.  Or maybe you want something sweet and cooling?  Try the "Truth or Square", a tart with a Funfetti Oreo crust, filled with mint chip ice cream, and tiled with Andes mints in way that is simple but looks stunning. 

Don't get me wrong, I love a "classic" apple pie or lemon tart, but this is a book that feels adventurous and exciting without feeling overwhelming or impossible. Some flavors and ingredients do feel exotic or specialty.  The author herself admits that she has access to an excellent variety of well-stocked supermarkets and a farmer's market, but even then it doesn't match the access she had to some fruits when she was growing up in South America.  She reminds the reader that most of what she makes, she makes because she has an abundance of it or because she has some wilting things that need to be used up.  Feel free to mix and match as you see fit!  The author also prefers to use natural coloring instead of artificial dyes, such as beet powder, carrot powder, blue spirulina, and more.  She gives tips and guides on purchasing and using these ingredients.

If you want to make some pies and tarts, or if you want to be artsy while also being delicious, take a look at this book.  Even if you just want to admire the pretty designs, you should also take a look at this book!  I think the only reason you would avoid this book is if you hate puns, or if you only want certain "classic" or "traditional" flavors, whatever that might mean to you.  Otherwise, this book is fun, adventurous, and zesty, with gorgeous photography to boot!

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a welcoming cookbook with a friendly, neighborly tone and Ko’s approach to cooking and writing seems to suggest you have wandered into your neighbor’s house who happens to be obsessed with making art on top of her pies (she gives friendly advice to the readers throughout the book, “dough can sense fear” for example). New pie bakers will not be intimidated by her techniques even though visually it might look like these pies are beyond most of our skills (they aren’t). A few ingredients like food grade lavender or dried strawberries or matcha may not be common in everyone’s kitchen but they are easy to get online.
I’m not much into the aesthetic of pie baking (though this book might change that), but I love to bake pies and what made this book work for me was the variety of fillings underneath all that décor: pink lemonade, beet crust (though I am not tempted to make this one!), orange curd with mezcal and chipotle, carrot miso (I love the imagination behind these combinations!).
My complaints: The tart chapter is a bit heavy with varieties of fruit curd—one or two recipes with variants would perhaps have been a better use of space. Same with the “colored” pie doughs, there are at least 25-30 pages spent on different colored pie doughs of which only a few ingredients change from one to the another and the method is basically the same for all.
The book is beautiful and could certainly function as an art piece. But it’s also a good cookbook even for those of us who already have a lot of pie cookbooks. Good addition to my library. And you can’t help but smile at the titles of the pies (Lattice quo, Kapiedoscope).

[KJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Usually I like to try a couple of recipes before I rate a cookbook, but social distancing isn't quite over and I still have nowhere I can pawn off stacks of baked goods to support my hobby and keep me on the "nope" side of diabetes. So note that this review has nothing to do with taste/flavor and everything to do with its usability. The recipes look delicious and the photos are definitely eye-catching, and the instructions seem easy enough to follow. I wasn't a huge fan of the layout, though-- filling and crust recipes occur in the context of a specific dish rather than being laid out on their own, and I think this would make it harder to remix-and-match if you wanted to try out different crust/filling combos. Flipping back and forth and having to keep track of which half of which recipe you're working with is just not my jam. I think it would have improved the overall usefulness of the book to have a section for crusts (one for pie, one for tarts), a section for fillings, and have suggested recipe combinations and designs as their own section. But maybe that's just me.

[Leane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stunning with quality photography illuminating the very, detailed instructions in each recipe, this baking cookbook is very much out of my league but a pleasure to view. Engaging writing permeates the Intro and each tart or pie recipe—I very much enjoyed the puns for each of the recipes –Like Spoke Signals and Mother Swirl. I will admit that I will never bake a confection from these pages, mostly due to the daunting amount of work and the somewhat exotic list of ingredients that I would never buy or eat. However, it was a breathtaking encounter with a true artist and should you be a braver baker—the instructions were thorough, especially for the geometric toppings. For anyone who just appreciates food as art and an act of creation for those one enjoys feeding. For similar approaches on baking look to Julie Jones, Helen Nugent, and Maya-Camille Broussard.

[melhara]

Lauren Ko makes some of the most stunning pies ever. I came across her Instagram account about a year ago as I was looking for pie design ideas for a pie-baking contest at work. I didn't end up participating at the contest and was going to participate this year, but the contest got cancelled due to COVID. Hopefully, the contest will run again next year so that I can use this book for some tips, tricks and inspiration!

You can check out her Instagram account @lokokitchen which features her hypnotic pie designs:

[Alison Neumann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I cannot wait to try many, many of these recipes!! The photography of the tarts and pies is gorgeous and mouthwatering.

I love puns, believe me - I named one of my chickens Ruth Bader Gins-bird - but the writing goes a bit over the top with the puns. Often I thought, “Well that’s a cute name and the pie looks amazing, but what kind of pie IS it?” Some kind of pie description would be an improvement to the recipes.

For a first time author and home-kitchen chef, this book and Lauren Ko’s creations are truly a work of art. The work deserves to be in homes of anyone who appreciates either.

[Phair · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was drawn to this by the intriguing cover in a library display. Lots of good info on various types/ recipes for crusts. Many are colored with vegetable powders rather than food coloring but I’ve not seen the powders around here. The pie & tart recipes were OK but were often too exotic or savory for my tastes. Most interesting were the instructions for making geometric top crusts using strips, braids and shapes but the mind boggled at the time, patience and manual dexterity needed to accomplish most of them. Super clever but far too ambitious for me to ever attempt.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a fun cookbook! The stories included were all very cute and heartfelt, the creativity that went into creating these designs speaks my love language, and the detail instruction in the recipes and recreating the designs is incredibly impressive. The photography is so beautifully done it captures the artwork in every pie. And the authors pun game is strong (pie-jinx, pieleantology, crust yourself...)

[Claudia Sorsby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I bought this book, along with a couple of other pie books, because I'd been following the author on Instagram. I knew her work was amazing, and I wanted to have photos safe in book form, rather than as ephemera saved on the internet.

I have no idea how the pies taste (yet); I'm essentially treating this as a coffee-table book. (It was also an excuse to buy something from Harvard Bookstore, to help during the pandemic.)

[Ligaya · Rating 4 out of 5]

I checked this out of the library with the intention of looking only at the photos and minimally reading any text pertaining to how to recreate these amazing pie top designs. I have PLENTY of great dessert cookbooks! But, I am finding myself sneaking into the words... the author writes hilariously. The designs are amazing and creative, and the clear step-by-step photos convince you that you can do it yourself. Can't wait to slice up some pastry and swirl dough bits onto my tarts and pies!

[Vincent · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing book! The recipes are very hard and you have to become an expert in handling pie dough, but the ideas are incredible. It was inspired by a small challenge to learn how to bake pies and share pies as food is my love language! Taking it up a notch by following these recipes will be a lifelong journey. A gift from my daughter Maggie and my future son-in-law Matthew, I couldn't be more thrilled to bake with them.

[Cait · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a "how does it taste" baker, not a "how does it look" baker; which is why I am never going to make it in the cut-throat world of competition baking.
EVEN WITH THAT CAVEAT: This is a great book- the recipes are interesting, and the one we've made so far (blueberry mint curd in a coconut pecan shell) is great.

[A Street · Rating 5 out of 5]

The photos of the pies are beautiful. Her directions are clear. The puns are grin-worthy. For me, the recipes are too much trouble to make (colored dough and fillings), BUT the book inspired me to put that extra love and care into the appearance of my pies. The spoke design (from the cover) was my biggest takeaway. Not difficult to do, very “WOW” in appearance.

[Dray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Partially a cookbook but partially a design book for producing over the top pie crusts and toppings that are artistic, beautiful and, wildly creative. Not all the designs are to my taste, but like art, there are some that really impress me, enough to try them on my creations. A very unique and worthwhile book.

[Samantha Mockford · Rating 4 out of 5]

I mostly ignored the recipes and enjoyed the book primarily for the photos and humorous anecdotes. But I will say there are some design ideas that are simultaneously beautiful AND achievable for the average baker, and I will try those next time I want to mix up my boring lattice-tops.

The designs are rivaled only by the puns.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! My one critic of this book is that I am not sure that I could meet this level ever - although it is inspiring. such a pretty book and such amazing techniques - although probably not ones to whip off in a short time.

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun, artistic pie book. I haven't tried any of her recipes. The intricate designs seem manageable with her directions. I've also watched some of her youtube videos. If you've the time, energy and want to impress everyone next time you bring a dessert, this book's for you:)

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was highly detailed and is an inspiring book but I’m not sure how many of the decorations I would make. I definitely want to make more pies and now I have a tart pan, so that’s exciting!

A library read, but not a book I would need to own.