At age 11, English Teacher Susie Mortensen won a blue ribbon at the 4th of July Apple Pie Baking Contest in her hometown of Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She partly owes her pie-making skills to her dad’s belief that the real measure of a person—especially a woman—is the ability to make an apple pie.

“His mother made apple pie, and he loved it. He asks people who come into our house, mainly females, ‘Can you make an apple pie?’ It’s his way of having fun with people,” said Susie, who grew up as the youngest of eight children.

Susie ran a pie-a-week subscription business during a few high school summers to earn money for college. Called “Susie’s Pies,” she advertised by putting pamphlets on the windows of the cars in the parking lot by her suburb’s train station. She charged $5 per pie, and she made 10 to 12 pies a day. Due to the summer heat, her parents ruled that she could only turn the oven on after their bedtime, relegating her pie-baking hours to nighttime.

Here are her five tips for making a pie worthy of her father’s praise.

Tip #1: Apples Really Matter

Use either Gravenstein or Granny Smith apples or a combination of the two for their sweet and sour flavors and how well they hold up during baking. Susie has a Gravenstein apple tree in her yard. Make sure to add half to a whole teaspoon of lemon rind to the apple mixture, and don’t forget to add cinnamon and a dash of nutmeg. Susie uses half of the amount of sugar that her recipe calls for, and no one misses the deleted crystals.

Tip #2: Crust Secrets

Freeze the butter and then grate it. This step makes it easier to roll out the dough and creates a pleasing crust texture. Use cold water from the tap—you don’t need to chill the water beforehand. Susie uses a KitchenAid mixer, being careful not to overmix the dough, mixing until the dough looks like big grits of sand that holds together for rolling into crusts. The dough should not be sticky.

Tip #3: Pie Prepping

Susie isn’t fussy with the crust; she uses a fork to flute the edges. She makes slits in the top crust, too, and also carves the first-name initial of the person she is making the pie for to prevent pie thievery. Do make an egg wash for the top crust and sprinkle the pie with sugar after you add the egg wash.

Tip #4: Oven Know-How

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees but then drop the temperature to 400 degrees when you place the pie in the oven. It’s a good idea to preheat the sheet pan—placed underneath the pie to collect drippings—as you preheat the oven. Keep an eye on the top crust, perhaps putting foil over the edges of the crust that you remove for the last 15 minutes of baking.

Tip #5: A Gesture of Comfort or Gratitude

When Susie makes a pie, she’s making it to comfort somebody if they’re experiencing trouble. It’s also her go-to gesture if someone’s done her a big favor. “It’s a little bit more effort than baking cookies, and it’s more than a card,” said Susie. “Right now, I owe my brother-in-law a pie because he picked my dad and me up when my dad’s car broke down on the freeway.” 

Decades In, Susie Still Finds Joy in Every Student Interaction

This school year marks Susie’s 32nd year as a teacher. She chose this career because she really likes kids. “That's it. I mean, I think it's because I'm the youngest in the big family, so I am habituated to having a lot of people around all the time, and I’m not the sort of person who would work in a quiet office,” said Susie.

She loves being around people and notes that she saw her parents raise all her brothers and sisters in very individual ways because of their own personalities. “I like getting to know all of my students, and I feel a little low in the summer when I’m not around a lot of people,” said Susie. "When you have 200 or so interactions during the school day, that’s a serious recipe for happiness. Why would a person ever be anything but a teacher?”

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