Recipe Notes: Fresh Lime Pie

15 January 2019

Recipe from The Cook's Illustrated Baking Book, 2013,  p. 403, also available online.

The recipe in the cookbook is for "Key Lime Pie", but since it doesn't use Key Limes, I changed the name. In developing the recipe, America's Test Kitchen tried Key Limes and regular limes and found there was no significant difference in taste. Since Key Limes are hard to find, expensive, and hard to work with, they created this recipe using regular (or Persian) limes. 

The filling was made first and it requires no cooking. Egg yolks and lime zest were whisked together. A can of sweetened condensed milk was whisked into the mixture followed by lime juice. The acid in the juice is all that is needed to cause the custard to set. The change in texture was visible within minutes. Following a tip in the cookbook, the limes were juiced efficiently using a potato ricer. While the filling sets, the graham cracker crust was made. Graham crackers were ground in a food processor into fine crumbs. Some melted butter and sugar were mixed with the crumbs and the mixture pressed into a pie pan baked. When it was done, the thickened filling was added to the warm crust and the completed pie was put back into the oven to complete the cooking. The finished pie was refrigerated before serving. This was a very simple pie to make with a relatively small number of ingredients and no tricky steps. From starting to removing the pie from the oven was just 90 minutes.

This was a good pie, and easy to make. Not surprisingly it tastes similar and has a similar texture to pies made with lemon custard. It was good both on the day it was made and on days afterwards. Simple to make, good to eat, this pie is worth having again.