How to make the perfect pie, according to Alison Roman

Food writer, cook, and author Alison Roman is joining the TODAY Food team to share a couple of her favorite pie recipes from her new cookbook, "Sweet Enough: A Dessert Cookbook." She shows us how to make a savory mushroom potpie and a sweet lemon custard pie with her go-to homemade pie crust.

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Alison Roman's Mushroom Pot Pie by Alison Roman

This is probably the best-tasting thing in the whole book — we aren't supposed to say things like that, and I also know that I am likely to change my mind fifty-three times between now and when this book is published. But today, on this gray wintry day, I am imagining a creamy mushroom filling made of many mushrooms (as advertised), baked between two pieces of flaky, perfectly salty, almost-too-buttery pie crust.

I am thinking of how creamy the filling is, how rich and meaty it tastes without any meat at all, and how despite my obsession with chicken pot pie, this mushroom pot pie is admittedly better. I love this mushroom pot pie for dinner alongside a bitter chicory salad, for a late lunch with orange wine, for eating in front of the TV with no plates, just forks.This could be made in the more traditional pot-pie style of one crust with the filling below, but I really love baking it as a "regular" pie, with a crust above and below.

While this isn't necessarily designed to be a perfectly sliceable pie, it is possible that with enough patience, this pie can be sliced. For the rest of us with no patience, you can serve it by scooping with a large serving spoon.

Lemon Shaker Pie by Alison Roman

From my lemon-obsessed point of view, I can confirm in a totally unbiased way that this is the best pie in the world. The name comes from the Shakers, a religious community who famously make use of the entirety of anything (an animal, a piece of wood, a whole lemon).

It's going to be sweet, of course, but it will also be bitter, complex, and tart because of the whole lemon, custardy because of the eggs, and a little salty, flaky, and crunchy because of the pie crust.

It's also going to be easy and foolproof, perfectly set and golden brown each time, as if touched by some sort of baking angel. It's going to be everything you want a lemon bar to be but more and better.

If you like those perfect pie recipes, you should also try these:

Fudgy Brownie Pie by Jesse Szewczyk

Martha Stewart's Sour Cherry Pie by Martha Stewart

This article was originally published on TODAY.com