Located In Amish Country, This Pennsylvania Bakery Has Perfected An Old-School Pie Recipe

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Shoofly pie may sound like a strange name for a dessert, but this delicious, crumbly confection has been eaten in Southeastern Pennsylvania for over a hundred years. Created by early Dutch immigrants in the 1800s, the dessert is similar to coffee cake, but with a sticky molasses bottom. It's perhaps the state's most famous pie, so it's worth asking: where can you get the best shoofly pie in Pennsylvania? While the answer is subjective, a bakery called Bird-in-Hand Bakery & Cafe has perfected its recipe and continues to impress its customers.

The establishment is located in the village of Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania, in the middle of Amish country. It is part of the larger Bird-in-Hand Corporation, which began with a restaurant and motor lodge launched by the Smucker family in the late 1960s. Its standalone bakery would open in 1984. All of its baked goods are made from scratch and some even use original recipes from CEO John Smucker's grandmother. Beyond its famous pie, the bakery uses local and homegrown produce to make soups, sandwiches, smoothies, and other menu items.

But the shoofly pie remains one of the bakery's biggest draws, and it serves slices in the restaurant and sells whole pies to go. For those living outside of the state, the pie is available to order online from their website or on Amazon.

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Multiple online reviews point to this eatery's shoofly pie as the best in the Keystone State. As one customer on Tripadvisor wrote, "I have been coming to the Bird In Hand Bakery and Cafe for many years and have always been very satisfied. I do believe they have the best shoofly pie in the area." Reddit users on the r/Lancaster thread expressed a similar sentiment about the bakery, with several people mentioning its flagship dessert. It was also featured in an episode of Al Roker's "Family Style" about the history of pie in America.

So what makes the dessert so great? Part of the reason it is so lauded is that the recipe has been passed down through generations and tweaked to perfection. Although shoofly pie is typically made with molasses as the key ingredient, Bird In Hand uses brown sugar and a light syrup for the sticky filling, as well as ingredients like eggs, flour, and cinnamon.

This results in a pleasantly dense pie, with a rich, gooey bottom, a cake-like top layer, and a crumb topping. Bird-in-Hand makes a "wet-bottomed" shoofly pie, which means that the sugar and syrup mixture sinks to the bottom while baking; the dry version gets baked for longer and is less gooey. Want to make your own? Here's a shortcut shoofly pie recipe.