GROUPON GUIDE TO RENO

21 Different Types of Pies You Have to Try

BY: Andy Seifert |Aug 31, 2022

We can all agree on one thing: pie is amazing, right?

Whether you’re eating it a la mode or a la...uh not-mode, pie has a place in our collective consciousness as the ultimate comfort food. Let this list of 21 different kinds of pie flavors be an inspiration to explore new fruit fillings, crusts, toppings, and more.

SHOP FOR DEALS AT BAKERIES NEAR YOU.

Pecan Pie

Distinguishing Features: Pecans, corn syrup (or brown sugar, or both); considered a southern dish, but you’ll find it anywhere you find pies; especially popular as a dessert during Thanksgiving or Christmas; the pumpkin pie is its heated rival.

Great Place to Try It: The family at Tee-Eva’s Old-Fashioned Pies and Pralines in New Orleans have been making pecan pie for five generations.

Apple Pie

Distinguishing Features: Apples, sugar, and cinnamon, often served with vanilla ice cream on the side; as the Great American Pie, it’s sometimes grouped with baseball and hot dogs as a purely American symbol (though the English and the Dutch have been making pies with apples for centuries).

Great Place to Try It: Apple Alley Bakery in Julian, CA, makes an assortment of apple pies in the self-proclaimed apple pie capital of the world.

Pumpkin Pie

Distinguishing Features: Pumpkin-flavored custard, ginger, nutmeg; it’s a Thanksgiving classic, in part because you can use your leftover Halloween jack-o-lantern for its stuffing; the pecan pie is its heated rival.

Great Place to Try It: Dessert Gallery Bakery & Cafe in Houston makes a mean old-fashioned pumpkin pie, but only three months out of the year.

Key Lime Pie

Distinguishing Features: Lime juice (specifically one from a Key lime), meringue topping, and graham-cracker crust; naturally, the pie is heavily associate with the Florida Keys, and Key West holds a festival for the pie every 4th of July Weekend.

Great Place to Try It: Swiss Haus Bakery in Philadelphia has been concocting dozens of pastries for 90+ years, including a toasted coconut-topped key lime pie.

Cherry Pie

Distinguishing Features: Cherries, namely Montmorency cherries, which are tarter and more sour than your usual Bing cherry; a favorite during the 4th of July; namesake of the 1990 chart-topping hit from glam-rockers Warrant.

Great Place to Try It: Fancy Cakes & Confections in Norman, OK, offers a scrumptious cherry pie to nearby University of Oklahoma students.

Lemon Meringue Pie

Distinguishing Features: Lemon custard with a meringue topping; this is that pie with the puffy, enlarged top that looks so soft and inviting, you kinda want to use it as a pillow; it’s also grandma’s favorite pie, often.

Great Place to Try It: Supreme Bakery in West Orange, NJ, offers a miniature version of a lemon meringue pie that will leave you thinking about eating another.

Sugar Cream Pie

Distinguishing Features: Brown sugar, butter, and cream; a simple treat, but one of the most addictive types of pies; popular in French and Quebecois cuisines, as well as the Midwest USA, where it is also called “Hoosier Pie” due to its association with Indiana.

Great Place to Try It: Mrs. Wick’s Pie Shop in Winchester, IN, might be the best place on earth to eat Hoosier Pie—the Wick family once sold them out of the back of a 1934 Buick.

Cheesecake

Distinguishing Features: First off—yes, this is a pie, since it uses a graham-cracker crust that’s synonymous with pies. The other main ingredient is cream cheese or ricotta, which can be combined with myriad other flavors (mocha, Oreos, peanut butter, etc.)

Great Place to Try It: Patisserie on Newbury in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood makes delectable cheesecake in-house.

Rhubarb Pie

Distinguishing Features: A whole lot of rhubarb, often paired with strawberries; one of the tartest pie flavors; a tempting treat for anyone on the “rhubarb diet” (yes, this is real).

Great Place to Try It: San Diego Chicken Pie Shop is (unsurprisingly) more famous for its chicken pie meals; but it also whips up a fantastic rhubarb pie that you can eat afterwards.

Sweet Potato Pie

Distinguishing Features: Sweet potato filling, often with a dollop of whipped cream on top, sometimes topped with a layer of marshmallows instead; a staple of Southern soul food, especially during the holidays.

Great Place to Try It: Snag a homemade Sweet Potato Pie in the Bay Area at Just Pies! By Tara.

Pot Pie

Distinguishing Features: The ultimate savory pie; gravy meets chicken, beef, or lamb (plus veggies), tucked inside a pie crust and served steaming hot; second only to chicken-noodle soup for best dishes to enjoy on a cold winter’s day, ideally from inside a log cabin while seated next to a roaring fire.

Great Place to Try It: The pot pie at The Pie Hole in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, was named one of the city’s best by LA Weekly.

Peach Pie

Distinguishing Features: Peaches, plus a sprinkling of nutmeg or cinnamon; it’s especially popular in peach-producing regions, like Georgia; some take their love of peach pie to the next level and create “peace pie moonshine” out of peach schnapps and grain alcohol.

Great Place to Try It: You gotta try one in Georgia, right? Panbury’s Double-Crust Pies in Atlanta landed on Eater’s “Nine Must-Visit Pie Destinations in Atlanta” list.

Coconut Cream Pie

Distinguishing Features: The king of cream pies, it’s a messy conglomeration of coconut custard, whipped cream, and toasted coconut flakes; eat this and imagine you’re on some deserted tropical island with rows of coconut trees (and somehow you have access to pie-making supplies).

Great Place to Try It: Don’t miss Brooklyn’s Miss American Pies, home to dozens of pie flavors, including a to-die-for coconut cream.

Strawberry Pie

Distinguishing Features: Strawberries. Lots and lots and lots of strawberries (ideally fresh strawberries), often mixed with a strawberry gelatin. We recommend some whipped cream on top to cut some of the sweetness.

Great Place to Try It: Every year in May, Jim’s Steak & Spaghetti in Huntington, WV, has a “Strawberry Pie Week,” where they sell more than 10,000 pies.

Blackberry Pie

Distinguishing Features: Either fresh blackberries or a blackberry jam, a small mountain of sugar, and sometimes some lemon zest or lemon juice.

Great Place to Try It: You could visit Minnesota’s North Shore and Betty’s Pies—one of America’s great pie shops—for all sorts of flavors, but we’ll take its blackberry-peach pie.

Blueberry Pie

Distinguishing Features: The best blueberries you can find, plus cinnamon; official state dessert of Maine, but don’t sleep on blueberry pies from Michigan, Washington, Maryland, and Oregon—all high blueberry-producing states.

Great Place to Try It: San Antonio’s Baklovah Bakery offers way more than than its signature baklava, including a delectable blueberry pie.

French Silk Pie

Distinguishing Features: It’s the chocolate pie: chocolate mousse, whipped cream, and bittersweet chocolate shavings; favorite pie of children at family reunions everywhere; despite its name, French Silk is a purely American invention, the winner of a 1951 Pillsbury competition.

Great Place to Try It: You might visit The Pie Factory in the Tampa area for its Key Lime pie, but don’t sleep on its French Silk either.

Mixed Berry Pie

Distinguishing Features: A little bit of this, a little bit of that; these pies usually include two or three of the following: blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, strawberries; if you’re in the upper Atlantic Canadian provinces, this might be called a “bumbleberry pie,” which is just delightful, isn’t it?

Great Place to Try It: Achatz Handmade Pie Co. in suburban Detroit offers a mixed-berry pie that uses local Michigan berries.

Banoffee

Distinguishing Features: An almost exclusively English pie, Banoffee is one of the best-known versions of the banana cream pie; bananas and toffee are its two must-have ingredients (the name Banoffee is a combo of the two), but you might also find a good heaping of dulce de leche.

Great Place to Try It: When in New York, stop by Bubby’s in Tribeca for a diner meal finished with a slice of Banoffee, lined with a graham-cracker crust.

Apple Crisp (or Apple Crumble)

Distinguishing Features: A variant of the apple pie, the Apple Crisp/Apple Crumble adds a crumbly, buttery topping that gives the pie extra texture. It’s mostly an autumn pie (to correspond with apple harvest in cooler climate), but no one will judge you if you want want one in the summer.

Great Place to Try It: Pie Town Cafe in suburban Dallas offers a tart green-apple pie with a cinnamon glaze.

Mississippi Mud Pie

Distinguishing Features: Chocolate filling, chocolate sauce drizzled on top, and—in case that wasn’t enough chocolate—a chocolate graham-cracker crust; it’s usually infused with other flavors (think coffee liqueur or butterscotch); as you might imagine, it’s a favorite in Mississippi.

Great Place to Try It: In Mississippi, of course! We recommend Mary Mahoney’s Old French House in Biloxi.