[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell
Images: courtesy Fork & Crust Pie Company and Catherine Frederick”][/title]
Lori Rae sits inside Fork & Crust Pie Company in Rogers, Arkansas, where the pies smell heavenly. Lori’s curly blonde hair tumbles free from its elastic band, in trailing tendrils that frame her face. Her eyes are the blue of shimmering water. Her long fingers tap the table as she talks. On her left arm, just above her inner wrist is a tattoo that reads “Dare Greatly.”
Lori got the tattoo not long after she and Molly Hennessy, her partner in pie, decided to open this shop. It was the perfect time to commemorate the two words that seem to be Lori’s motto.
By that time, Lori and Molly had been friends for nearly twenty years. They met when they were both stay-at-home moms. They lived catty-cornered from each other in a neighborhood in the mountain town of Harrison in north central Arkansas. Married, with four children apiece, they spent a lot of time cooking and baking and a lot of time shuttling the kids to and from dozens of activities.
It wasn’t until one of Lori’s daughters was a junior in high school that baking took on a more important role. Her daughter had just committed to play soccer at an NCAA Division 1 college, and the family was celebrating. Soon after, however, tests uncovered a medical condition that was serious enough for the college to rescind its offer. In the weeks and months that followed, the family searched for the right specialist, seeing five doctors before they found the answers they were looking for.
“She’s my kid who’s always calm and in control, but at that time, she was upset and crying. Just remembering that time makes me want to cry,” Lori says, and her eyes dampen. “One day, we were watching TV—and we didn’t watch much TV—and there was a show about hand-pitting cherries for cherry pies. My daughter and I were interested. It was something to take her mind off what was going on. And that’s really how it started. Pitting cherries and baking pies really helped us through that time.”
The following year, Lori was looking out her window at Molly’s house, something that happened regularly because of the way their houses were situated. But this time, an idea began to brew. Lori’s roots were in the kitchen. “My great-grandmother,” she says, “lived in Turon, Kansas, and she baked pies for all the local cafés in her little town. And I grew up in Branson, cooking with my grandmother. We never made anything from a box. My mom always cooked. We were a baking family.”
Which made Lori an excellent baker. And Molly was an excellent baker. Their kids were growing up by then. What if they started a baking business, Lori wondered. And so she picked up the phone and called Molly to see what she thought.
Thankfully, Molly agreed that it was a grand idea, and their first company, A Little Smitten Pies, was born.
They began by taking their small, freestanding pies (they were packaged without pie tins) to the Farmers Market of the Ozarks in Springfield, Missouri. Their first recipe was hand-pitted cherry, a nod to the pie that helped Lori and her daughter through those trying days. In four months’ time, they were so busy, they realized they couldn’t keep doing what they’d started out to do. So they switched gears, rented a commercial kitchen in Harrison and started selling wholesale, something that continues today. And that was so successful that they decided to branch out with their shop, Fork & Crust Pie Company, in Rogers, which opened to the public in December 2015.
“I’m one of those people who gets an idea, and I don’t necessarily think things through.” Lori smiles, and you can see how her mind works, gears clipping along all the time. She says, “Sometimes that hurts me, but I just go for it. I know I drive Molly crazy. I drive my husband crazy. But I knew people loved pie, and people loved baking and they’re intrigued by it. We hand roll everything. We make everything, and we set up Fork and Crust so you can see the process, you can watch what we do.”
Their pies are delightful and decadent and indulgent. Crusts that are perfectly made, and fillings that are swoon-worthy. “Molly is really good at recipes, and I have recipes from my grandma, and we’re foodies, so we like making things up,” Lori says. “Our caramel pecan isn’t like any other caramel pecan; it isn’t as sweet. There are two things we love: salted caramel and crumb toppings. Our strawberry rhubarb has a crumb topping. Customers also like traditional, like our coconut or chocolate. One of the most asked about is our pear ginger with cranberries that we have at the holidays. I love our buttermilk pie and anything with peaches.
“One of my favorite things is connecting with the customers. Saturday, a little girl came in and she wanted the raspberry chiffon, and she didn’t see it. She was so disappointed. We did have it. It was being sliced when she came in, and you should have seen her face when we showed her the pie.”
“But I knew people loved pie, and people loved baking and they’re intrigued by it. We hand roll everything. We make everything, and we set up Fork and Crust so you can see the process, you can watch what we do.”
As Lori is telling this story, a man walks into the shop. He is rubbing his jaw, and he says, “I just came from the dentist, so I’m a little numb.” Lori laughs, realizing his first stop after the dentist was to Fork & Crust Pie Company, but that’s how delicious this pie is. It’s good enough to forget diets or to consider the irony of stopping by for a slice just after a trip to have a tooth filled, and to do it anyway.
“When people tell us our pies are as good as mom’s or better than mom’s or grandma’s, that’s really something. It’s hard to be better than mom’s, and we know that, so those compliments mean a lot.”
Lori’s thoughts turn to her own grandmother, who has passed on. “From the time I was ten,” Lori says, “I would sit on a stool she had in her kitchen, and I would sit and watch, and we would bake. It’s what we did. She’d typed up her recipes over the years, and my father gave them to me, so I have them all.”
For Lori, pie represents tradition and family and memories. So there is sentiment attached to this career she and Molly have carved out. But there is also a great deal of work. Recently, in two days, 200 pies had been baked and sold.
Each of Lori’s and Molly’s kids has had a hand in helping create a pie. “My son asked for a butterscotch pecan pie. We had a chocolate oat pie that was really interesting. We’d called it an oatmeal pie, and because of that people were really iffy. So Molly’s daughter said we should add chocolate to it, so we did. We put chocolate ganache on the bottom and drizzled it on the top. After that, it became popular.”
Fork & Crust Pie Company is expanding into Fayetteville this August. And there are already baking classes going on at the Rogers shop. It’s a lot of work, especially rolling all those crusts, but Lori says it’s worth it. She’s still commuting from Harrison, the drive an hour and a half each way. One of the bright spots, though, is that her youngest daughter is a student at the University of Arkansas, so she’s closer to her when she’s at work.
But she misses spending time with her husband, who has an optometry practice in Harrison. And she misses her sweet dog. Sometimes she’ll look up, and she’ll see her husband’s car outside the shop, and he’ll have their dog with him. They’ve come to see her, missing her as much as she misses them.
There is so much to be thankful for. Her husband, her kids, Molly. She smiles again. Not far away, in the kitchen, two of Fork and Crust’s employees, Tyler and Sally, work side by side. “Those two are just wonderful,” Lori says.
The sun is bright, and it shines on everything inside Fork & Crust Pie Company Outside, the wind whips through hedges, and whistles through the trees. Lori shuts her eyes for just a moment, and she looks radiant in the light, this woman who dares greatly, this woman who dreams big.
Fork & Crust Pie Company
Village on the Creeks
5208 Village Parkway, Suite 11
Rogers, Arkansas
Monday – Friday 10am – 6pm & Saturday 11am – 4pm
forkandcrust.com
