The Frozen Pie That Beats Most Grocery Store Bakeries

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I am an avid home baker, and pies are my specialty. I started baking them with my grandma when I was six or seven, so it's safe to say that I am very, very picky about store-bought pies. My absolute favorite pie of all time is my grandma's chocolate pie, but it takes hours to make a traditional chocolate cream pie from scratch, and if one step goes wrong, the whole thing is ruined. Unfortunately, buying a chocolate pie from a grocery bakery would be a waste of money, as the flavor is so far removed from anything resembling homemade that I wouldn't even enjoy eating it. 

In my opinion, most pies from grocery store bakeries have crusts that are limp and soggy, and the filling is overly sweet with no underlying subtle notes of spices or extracts to balance it out. Frozen pies tend to have crumbly, chalky crusts that are tasteless and don't hold up to baking. Yet the one exception I've found in my decades of sampling hundreds of grocery-store pies is a frozen Marie Callender's pie you should absolutely add to your shopping cart. The brand's Chocolate Satin Pie is a thaw-and-serve dessert that is made with chocolate cream filling and topped with whipped cream and chocolate chips. The filling is semi-sweet, so the toppings aren't overwhelming. It has a slightly sweet chocolate cookie crust with the perfect crumbly, crunchy texture to balance the rich creaminess of the filling.

Chocolate pies are notoriously tricky to make at home as there are so many mistakes you can make with mousse and custard. If you aren't an experienced baker or are short on time, you're better off buying one from the store than making it from scratch. Yet I've found that store-bought options are almost always disappointing.

Most grocery bakeries don't make the chocolate filling for French silk and chocolate mousse pies from scratch, which may be why it tastes cloyingly sweet and artificial. It is usually also one-note with no subtleties. The texture of the filling and crust is also usually off, with the custard being too dense and heavy and the crust completely saltless. Many are also topped with artificial-tasting or cloying whipped cream.

By contrast, Marie Callender's is the best brand for frozen pies, and its Chocolate Satin pie is the closest I've found to mimicking that homemade flavor I crave. The filling is light and airy, but also rich, with much more of a real cocoa flavor and more depth and complexity than you would expect. It doesn't have that obnoxiously artificial and far-too-sweet flavor I've noticed in chocolate pies from store bakeries. Though a homemade chocolate pie would be far superior, this one is perfect to keep in the freezer for a pie emergency, or buy for an unexpected occasion or when I have a sudden craving but don't have time to bake. Best of all, a Marie Callender's Chocolate Satin Pie is under $7 at Walmart, and has received plenty of positive reviews from customers.