1760 Homestead Farm: Home of the Concord Grape Pie

Part of every Thanksgiving – or Friendsgiving – celebration is the unspoken competition of who brings, or makes, the best dessert. Sometimes that can mean the most unique dessert, and on the East End you don’t have to look further than 1760 Homestead Farm’s concord grape pie in Riverhead.

In fact, according to owner and chef Larry Kaiser, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who pass the sign on Sound Avenue that says “Grape Pie,” say “What on Earth is a grape pie?” and keep driving, and those who pull into the farm to try it out. That second group become lifelong customers of the farm, Kaiser says.

“At the cashier’s window, we have to keep a jar of disposable forks, because a lot of people want to eat the pie on the way home,” Kaiser tells Dan’s Papers. “We’ve actually had people buy one, sit in their car and eat it, and come back to buy a larger one. In another instance, a couple came back in and they bought two large grape pies. And the cashier’s like, ‘Weren’t you just here?’ They’re like, ‘Yeah, we got down and we parked and we had this. We wanted to taste the pie. It was so phenomenal. We had to come back and get two full- size to bring home with us.’”

The grape pie, Kaiser says, is his own creation, inspired by a friend from upstate New York.

“To make a long story short, how it started out, I was at a dinner party in the Finger Lakes region and the hostess served grape pie,” Kaiser says. “It’s a local delicacy up there. Concord grapes are grown in New York State, up in that region – Rochester, Syracuse, the Finger Lakes. Okay, so she offered me the pie, and it was okay. And she says, ‘Larry, I know your skills. You can do better. You need to bring this pie to Long Island. You live and work in wine country. Wine and grapes. It’s not the same grapes, but they do go together.’ I said, ‘OK, fine.’ So we sought out processors. After they squeeze the grapes for juice, we buy the pressings, we work with the processor and they send us down the pressings. We have a proven recipe and we reconstitute it into a grape pie filling. So we basically took a byproduct of grape juice and turned it into a product of its own with zero food waste.”

The pies have become so popular that Kaiser needs to reserve almost 3,000 pounds of grape pressings each year to be able to make enough filling.

“It’s popular any time of the year,” Kaiser says. “We do them in 10-inch full-size, and then we’ll do a smaller version, six-inch.”

Other pie offerings at 1760 Homestead Farm include pecan brownie pie – a dark chocolate fudge brownie baked in a pie shell with a pecan pie filling – and shoe fly pie, a traditional Amish recipe.

1760 Homestead Farm also offers tons of fresh produce, with 80 laying hens, tomatoes, dill, cilantro, parsley, thyme, eggplant, radishes and tons more.

Kaiser and Margaret Feinberg, his wife, are from Jamesport and purchased the 1760 Homestead Farm property in 2013 from the Tuthill family. It had been theirs since 1865, but the homestead itself dates back to its namesake year, 1760 – making it the oldest standing homestead on Sound Avenue. Kaiser and Feinberg are the fourth-ever owners of the property.

“It’s definitely haunted,” Kaiser says. “It’s definitely got spirits here. We find coins on the window sills, and we don’t move them. Sometimes they go away, sometimes they reappear. We don’t move them. We’ll be working in the barn – in the smaller barn out back, which dates also back to 1760 – we’ll hear footsteps up in the attic.”

Kaiser’s expertise as a chef has garnered him international praise, as he recently competed in Netflix’s Blue Ribbon Baking Championship, showcasing the grape pie to an audience of millions.

As a result, Kaiser says, he’s got grape pie-loving fans as far as Australia.