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Nov. 1st, 2004 11:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gmonkey42I made pie over the weekend. It was pretty good and I'm proud of myself because it wasn't just one whole recipe for a pie, I cobbled together a few different recipes. So here you go:
Citrus Custard Pie
crust:
* 2 cups flour with a dash of salt
* 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter and 1/4 cup shortening (like Crisco)
OR 3/4 cup (1.5 sticks) butter if you want to avoid partially hydrogenated oil
* 4-5 tablespoons cold water
The tricky part is 'cutting' the butter and shortening into the dough (I think that's the term for it). The shortening should be cool but it'll be a huge pain in the ass if you store your butter in the freezer, as I do. So maybe put the butter in the fridge overnight first if you normally keep it frozen. If you have a pastry cutter thing, use that but I'm not even entirely sure what that is; the alternative is to take two knives and blob the butter/shortening into a big bowl with the flour and cut up the blobs until they're all tiny and you have a crumbly mixture. The recipe said it should be like coarse cornmeal but it wasn't quite that fine when I gave up and went on to the next step and it still turned out well.
The next step is to add 1 tablespoon of the water and mix it in with a fork. The first tablespoon won't do much but mix it plenty and add the rest of the water a little at a time while mixing and you'll end up with dough that's sort of crumbly but you can squish it into a ball and roll it out. Which is what you need to do next. Put plenty of flour on the surface so it doesn't get stuck. I had that problem. Then stick it in a pie tin and smoosh the edges down so it'll look pretty. Instead of all ragged edges. You'll have some leftover dough - this recipe actually makes enough for if you want to make a pie with dough pieces on top, like an apple pie. So you could make less. I had about 1/4 of the dough left so I stuck it in the freezer and I figure next time, I can make half as much dough as before and I'll have about the right amount.
OK, on to the filling:
* 3 eggs
* 1.5 cups milk (I used 2%; I'd recommend using milk with some fat in it)
* 1/2 cup sugar
* one each of whatever fruits you want to use - lemon, orange and/or lime. I used lemon and orange.
Mix the eggs, milk and sugar in a bowl. Wash the fruits thoroughly. Get a cheese grater and use the finest, um, gratey thing to get little bits of peel. Just take the whole, unpeeled fruit and rub it on the grater, over a bowl. Do this till your arm gets tired and you have a little pile of grated peel and you think "OK, that looks like enough." It's roughly 1 to 1.5 teaspoons. Mix the peel into the egg-milk-sugar mixture. For extra flavor, you can add some of the juice if you want.
Pour the filling into the crust and bake at 350° for... about 20 minutes then check it. I don't know how long it took, actually, because I didn't know how long it would take to cook the custard so I just kept checking it periodically. It still looks pretty wobbly even when it's done but when it's done, it'll have a little light brown color on top and you'll be able to stick a knife in and have it come out clean. It could have been as much as 40 minutes. I let it cool to room temperature before putting it in the fridge - I don't know if this is necessary but I thought it might get soggy otherwise.
So you can serve it as-is, or spread some lemon curd on top, garnish it with slices of the fruit, put some whipped cream on top, etc.
I think the basic custard pie recipe (minus the fruit, I mean) would be easy to modify with different flavors - I might try it with strawberry chunks next. And maybe a creme brulee pie, with just custard and then burnt sugar on top (you can broil it in the oven to do that - you don't have to have one of those torch things, although those things are pretty cool). Ooh, except that might burn the crust. You can put foil over the crust to protect it from burning to some extent. Might want to try that will little tartlets before making a whole big pie, in case it burns.
Also? My mum said something funny. We were talking about the pie and I said I put on the lemon curd after it was baked because I didn't know how that would come out if I cooked it (plus the custard would have to be cooked first anyway or else it would be liquid and therefore impossible to have lemon curd spread over it.) My mum said you could cook it because in England she used to have lemon turd carts. And we all had a good laugh.
Citrus Custard Pie
crust:
* 2 cups flour with a dash of salt
* 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter and 1/4 cup shortening (like Crisco)
OR 3/4 cup (1.5 sticks) butter if you want to avoid partially hydrogenated oil
* 4-5 tablespoons cold water
The tricky part is 'cutting' the butter and shortening into the dough (I think that's the term for it). The shortening should be cool but it'll be a huge pain in the ass if you store your butter in the freezer, as I do. So maybe put the butter in the fridge overnight first if you normally keep it frozen. If you have a pastry cutter thing, use that but I'm not even entirely sure what that is; the alternative is to take two knives and blob the butter/shortening into a big bowl with the flour and cut up the blobs until they're all tiny and you have a crumbly mixture. The recipe said it should be like coarse cornmeal but it wasn't quite that fine when I gave up and went on to the next step and it still turned out well.
The next step is to add 1 tablespoon of the water and mix it in with a fork. The first tablespoon won't do much but mix it plenty and add the rest of the water a little at a time while mixing and you'll end up with dough that's sort of crumbly but you can squish it into a ball and roll it out. Which is what you need to do next. Put plenty of flour on the surface so it doesn't get stuck. I had that problem. Then stick it in a pie tin and smoosh the edges down so it'll look pretty. Instead of all ragged edges. You'll have some leftover dough - this recipe actually makes enough for if you want to make a pie with dough pieces on top, like an apple pie. So you could make less. I had about 1/4 of the dough left so I stuck it in the freezer and I figure next time, I can make half as much dough as before and I'll have about the right amount.
OK, on to the filling:
* 3 eggs
* 1.5 cups milk (I used 2%; I'd recommend using milk with some fat in it)
* 1/2 cup sugar
* one each of whatever fruits you want to use - lemon, orange and/or lime. I used lemon and orange.
Mix the eggs, milk and sugar in a bowl. Wash the fruits thoroughly. Get a cheese grater and use the finest, um, gratey thing to get little bits of peel. Just take the whole, unpeeled fruit and rub it on the grater, over a bowl. Do this till your arm gets tired and you have a little pile of grated peel and you think "OK, that looks like enough." It's roughly 1 to 1.5 teaspoons. Mix the peel into the egg-milk-sugar mixture. For extra flavor, you can add some of the juice if you want.
Pour the filling into the crust and bake at 350° for... about 20 minutes then check it. I don't know how long it took, actually, because I didn't know how long it would take to cook the custard so I just kept checking it periodically. It still looks pretty wobbly even when it's done but when it's done, it'll have a little light brown color on top and you'll be able to stick a knife in and have it come out clean. It could have been as much as 40 minutes. I let it cool to room temperature before putting it in the fridge - I don't know if this is necessary but I thought it might get soggy otherwise.
So you can serve it as-is, or spread some lemon curd on top, garnish it with slices of the fruit, put some whipped cream on top, etc.
I think the basic custard pie recipe (minus the fruit, I mean) would be easy to modify with different flavors - I might try it with strawberry chunks next. And maybe a creme brulee pie, with just custard and then burnt sugar on top (you can broil it in the oven to do that - you don't have to have one of those torch things, although those things are pretty cool). Ooh, except that might burn the crust. You can put foil over the crust to protect it from burning to some extent. Might want to try that will little tartlets before making a whole big pie, in case it burns.
Also? My mum said something funny. We were talking about the pie and I said I put on the lemon curd after it was baked because I didn't know how that would come out if I cooked it (plus the custard would have to be cooked first anyway or else it would be liquid and therefore impossible to have lemon curd spread over it.) My mum said you could cook it because in England she used to have lemon turd carts. And we all had a good laugh.
