Remember when Hubig’s Pies turned up on grocery shelves, in racks at hardware stores and even on restaurant dessert lists? Those were the days. Pre-Katrina New Orleans was a world where handheld apple pies could be an impulse purchase for a quick snack on your way through the concrete jungles. Perfectly packaged desserts at the ready. The sweet treats then turned up in pints of ice cream in grocery freezers as a new flavor from the New Orleans Ice Cream Co., a company determined to convert every conceivable sweet New Orleans flavor into an ice cream.
With chunks of Hubig's apple pie in vanilla ice cream, the sugar topping on the pie proved a bit too sweet. "It made your teeth melt," Adrian Simpson, owner of New Orleans Ice Cream Co., said. So the ice cream company paired up with the pie-making company to blind-bake pies without the sugar topping, creating a sort of deconstructed Hubig's pie for the recipe. The resulting 1,000 cases sold quickly. The day after the Hubig's factory burned down, New Orleans Ice Cream Co. made its last 300 cases, which is rolled out periodically in stores across the city until the last pint was sold.
"We'll keep Hubig's on the rador for everyone until they come back," Simpson promised. Fingers crossed!
