In the late summer, a baker’s fancy turns to thoughts of pie. Everywhere you look in the markets, you’re confronted with gorgeous fruit in season.

Naturally, this is the time of year to hold pie contests. The 5th Annual Mission Pie Contest pulled in 20 hopefuls on Sunday, and the people who showed up were as varied as the pies they brought to the competition.

Mission Pie co-owner Krystin Rubin preps the contenders. Can you tell which one will win Best in Show? Hint: it’s staring you right in the face!

After the judges got an eyeful of the complete pie (appearance was a key judging factor), Mission Pie co-owner Krystin Rubin cut them open. You’d think, as a professional, she’d cast a jaundiced eye over some of the sloppier entrants, but no. “Each one is just a delight to encounter. The amount of care that’s gone into each one of these... Really, it’s touching to me, how seriously all the contestants are taking this.”

While the judges tasted and took notes in the kitchen, the contenders and their supporters dove into the rest of the pies laid out in the front room.

Checking out the competition while the judges deliberate back in the kitchen.

Callie Arnold, a pre-school teacher currently from West Marin, made a chocolate cherry pie. She acknowledged preemptively that the recipe makes for a pie that’s “a little soupy,” but that’s exactly why she thinks it works. Arnold loves how the cherry juices run out and mix with the chocolate. Years of practice have made her confident of this pie’s charms, but she harbored doubts when I talked to her, right after she tasted the Shaker Lemon.

The Shaker Lemon.

Clothing designer Michelle Tannenbaum of San Francisco was also worried about the Shaker Lemon. She made a galette with plums, pluots, and Mission, Adriatic and Kadota figs. The filling came courtesy of Knoll Farms, the famous fig producer from Brentwood. OK, so I’m biased, because I did a story on them two years ago for NPR and I was blown away by their fruit. Tannenbaum was more than blown away. After years of arriving at the open of the Ferry Building Farmers' Market to get first crack at their fruit, she finally began selling for the Knolls at their stand. The habit is cheaper that way.

With 20 pies on the table, Judge Patricia Hewitt has got to take careful notes.

Back in the kitchen, the judging continued. Filmmaker Kyle Garrett recently started The 7 Squared Project, a documentary series highlighting non-profit and otherwise “purposeful” businesses in San Francisco. Mission Pie, with its mission driven approach to community building, is one of his subjects. Of course, I had to ask him about the Shaker Lemon. Garrett thought it “pretty spectacular,” even though he’s not a huge lemon fan. “It was kind of crisp and chewy at the same time. The flavor was not overpowering.“

Judge Kyle Garrett clears his palette with a sip of water.

While there were professional bakers on the judging panel, (Michelle Pusateri of Nana Joe's Granola and Mission Pie’s Sharon Litzky) Mission Pie’s co-owners Krystin Rubin and Karen Heisler like to make sure non-professionals are well represented, too. Each year, the previous year’s winner is invited to judge. Patricia Hewitt won the contest last year with a honey pie, made with honey from her own bee hive. “A honey mousse pie, really. With a very flaky crust.”

The Emperor Norton

Hewitt was immediately taken with the concept of the Emperor Norton, a chocolate nut concoction. “It’s incredibly sweet and nutty, and Emperor Norton probably was sweet and nutty, too. I’m really thrilled to see someone incorporating the history of San Francisco into a San Franciscan pie contest.”

There must be some way to find the metaphoric significance in the toughness of the crust as it relates to the character of the famous 19th century oddball, but I can’t think of it off-hand. Somebody had to hold the plate down, so Hewitt could make off with a bite of the Emperor Norton using her compostable fork. Still, she was smitten.

After 90 minutes, with the crowd in the front room buzzed with restless energy. They’d already fixed on their pick for People’s Choice. But the judges in the kitchen took their time, deliberating earnestly.

Everybody loved the flaky crust on the Shaker lemon, but only on top. The bottom was gummy, and in a pie contest, anything less than a dynamite crust will take you out of the running. The judges waxed lyrical about the crust on a lime blackberry Italian meringue that “revealed itself in layers.” Best Crust by a unanimous vote.

Emperor Norton walked away with Most Creative. But the crown for Best in Show went to something entirely different, an unassuming pie with none of the visual flash or dazzle of its competitors. It was, one judge said later, “a sleeper.”

When the group got to the Coffee Break Pie, they all murmured the word “love” in unison. Even though one judge worried the taste was so “classic,” there was a good chance this pie came straight from an old recipe book. As if that would be a problem. Executing a pie recipe properly is no small feat.

The judge needn’t have worried. Coffee Break Pie did not exist before Sunday.

Sarah Jones takes the crown to thunderous applause.

For the past two weeks, Sarah Jones of Dallas (and more recently Palo Alto) has been baking “non-stop.” She baked every night, and ate pie for breakfast, searching for the perfect recipe. Her colleagues in accounting at Apple have also been gamely gaining weight in support of her bid.

Jones found something close in Bon Appetit: a recipe for caramel coffee creme brulee. And then she found another, for a salty honey pie.

“So I basically took a salty honey recipe, substituted caramel that was infused with coffee for the honey and then did a Biscoff cream (creamed cookies, people!) and sea salt." She had been looking for Nutella in the market and came across the Biscoff instead...

“At the last minute, I decided to lighten it up with the Biscoff cream, and I think that helped cut the sweetness a little bit.”

“I was so afraid,” Jones said, “because everybody had fruit, and I was going to go fruit. And I just decided, you know, I’m going to go really rich.”

She must have been gauging the tenor of the room, because the People’s Choice was indeed fruity to the max: Ru Cymrot-Wu’s Olallieberry and Peach.

Ru Cymrot-Wu wins the People’s Choice award

Two awards for summer fruit. Two for rich and creamy. In all honesty, they were all of them poetry on a plate. In this kind of a contest, everybody wins.

Listen to me: good fat makes good pie crust.

Books like The Pie & Pastry Bible, Cookwise, and others make a big fuss about technique. Freeze the butter, freeze half the butter, use only butter, use butter and shortening, roll it into shards, cut it into cubes, chill the dough, chill it again, on and on and on, til anyone would be convinced that you need an advanced degree from Pie Crust U to turn out anything worth eating.

But you know what you really need? Your two hands, some flour, a little salt, butter, and lard.

Yes, lard. Good lard, which is to say, rendered leaf lard made from happy pigs who spent their lives outside doing happy piggy things. In New York City, I used lard from Flying Pig Farm in the Berkshires. Here, I get my tub o' lard from Range Brothers, the pig-farming arm of Prather Ranch. It's creamy-white and waxy, with a faint but unmistakeably meaty-rich aroma, something like really good drippings. For baking, it's important to look for leaf lard, the very pure fat from around the kidneys, since it's denser and firmer and less strongly flavored than fat from the rest of the animal. Sloshy, slushy lard from other parts may make fabulous tamales, but leaf lard is for baking.

What I like best is a mix of butter (for tenderness and flavor) and lard (for suppleness and texture). I wouldn't use lard for everything, although you probably could. For creamy custard fillings, or delicate fruits high in sugar and acid (like peaches, plums, and cherries) I'd probably stick with a lighter, more crumbly all-butter crust. But for more mellow fillings--apples, pears, pumpkin, pecan--as well for savory chicken or meat pies, lard n' butter works like a dream.

Why? Three words: texture, texture, texture. Lard gives a silky flakiness more like a croissant than your usual crust. The meatiness disappears and all that's left are beautiful golden-brown shards breaking up under your eager fork. If you think crust is just there to hold up the filling, this will change your mind.

Obviously, I have strong feelings about this issue. So why not them to the test and see how my pie stacked up against the competition at the annual apple-pie contest held at the charmingly local Sebastopol Gravenstein Apple Fair. This annual August event is a fund-raiser for the excellent Sonoma Farm Trails program, as well as an all-around celebration of the Gravenstein apple, Sonoma rural know-how (from beekeeping to sheep husbandry), and middle-aged guys in Hawaiian shirts jamming loud bar blues, all under the spreading oaks of Ragle Ranch Park. (The Fair continues Sunday, Aug 16, from 10am to 5pm.)

Now, full disclosure: back in 2001, a pie of mine won the Grand Championship prize in this very contest. I entered again last year, though, and didn't even make it into the top three. The pie world: a fickle place!

One of the perks of winning in 2001 was returning as a judge the following year. Which meant I saw, and tasted, all the things that can go wrong: proud, beautifully formed crusts burnt chocolate brown; pale, pallid crusts that shouted "I'm made with Crisco!"; underbaked apples chalky with starch alternated with fillings flavored with weird things like lime zest and nutmeg. As Fran Lebowitz wrote in Metropolitan Life,

People have been cooking and eating for thousands of years, so if you are the very first person to think of putting fresh lime juice in scalloped potatoes, try to imagine that there must be a reason for this.

So I made a plain old pie, only with lard and with Pink Pearl apples, my favorite heirloom because not only are they tart and snappy, they're Barbie pink. Except that you wouldn't know it, because their skin is pale and creamy, nothing special, until you cut inside and wham! Fuschia!

The pie I made was pretty in pink and the crust divine, but all for naught: after hanging out at the fair for 2 hours, checking out the goat-milking demonstration and the 1940s tractors, sampling the multiple apple pie/cobbler/fritter stands, admiring the many face-painted children and their mom-jean-wearing moms and/or tattooed dads all happily gnawing on enormous barbecued Willie Bird turkey legs, the announcement was made, and my pie was not among those honored.

Oh, well. It might be a loser, but it's a beautiful one, at least. For pie, the best is always Mom's, and how can a contestant know what kind of pie the judges came home to on a sunny afternoon?

Life is short, though. Bake pie for the people who need pie, and don't worry about the ribbons.