Learning 2 Bake from Scratch – XXXIX

Lemon Meringue Pie

I don’t know why The Laird wanted pie, let alone lemon meringue, as his birthday cake, but he did.

I liked the tone of the Sally’s Baking Addiction recipe, so that’s what I used for the filling. I used my pie crust recipe, which needs just a touch more water for the dough to be manageable. I should have made a half-batch because now I have one crust’s worth of dough in the refrigerator. Since I converted it to grams, I’m posting it again:

Pie Crust (enough, barely, for top and bottom)
240 g pastry flour
1 Tbl sugar (easier than tiny gram amounts)
1 tsp salt
1 cup butter (2 sticks, chopped at least into quartered Tbls)
65 g water (I think 70)
1 tsp lemon juice

Everything should remain cold and you should not touch it any more than absolutely required. Put all the dry ingredients into a chilled bowl. Stir in, with chilled utensil, the first stick of chopped butter, leaving the second stick in the refrigerator. Using a pastry knife, cut the butter in moderately well. Chill – bowl, pastry knife, and stirring utensil – for 10 minutes. Stir in the second stick of butter. Pastry knife it all down until no chunks of butter are larger than pea sized. Chill – bowl and stirring utensil (you’re done with the pastry knife) – for 10 minutes, again. Add liquid bit-by-bit (it’s only just over 6 Tbl, so the bits are small), stirring it in between each bit. Wrap it in plastic – it will seem *way* too dry – and refrigerate for several hours. Two is minimum; overnight is better – it lets the water disperse. Put your rolling pin the refrigerator, too.

Lightly flour a surface. Put a bit more than half the dough on it (rewrap and refrigerate the other half). Bash it flat with the rolling pin. Lightly flour the surface and roll it out to bottom crust size. Use your hands as needed to patch any holes that develop, but remember: Do not touch it more than absolutely necessary. It’s very fragile, so folding it over itself using a dough scraper to loosen the edges is the easiest way to keep it from coming apart. Think of folding for turning pastry dough, but not rolling it out again. Put it in the pie plate and unfold. Festive-ize the edge as you see fit. Stick it back in the refrigerator. After cooling the rolling pin down again, repeat for the top crust, but put the folded up crust on the plastic wrap and back in the refrigerator until you’re ready for it. In this case, that would be never because there is no top crust.

That sounds much harder than it is. Keep it cold. Chop in butter. Keep it cold. Add liquid. Keep it cold. Roll it out. Keep it cold. That’s it. Here it is ready for par/blind baking:

Cover with foil and add the beans (I like beans because if they get dirty, you can just throw them away; pie weights need to be washed). Par/Blind bake at 375 to desired doneness. In this case, about half-done since it will be baked again. About halfway through, remove the weights and poke the bottom – a lot – with a fork. Watch it because it may require further poking if it starts to balloon up.

Meanwhile, do the filling. I prepped everything before rolling out the crust. I feel less rushed that way.

Lemon Custard Filling
5 large egg yolks (use the whites in the meringue below)
1 and 1/3 cups (320ml) water
1 cup (200g) granulated sugar
1/3 cup (38g) cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (120ml) fresh lemon juice (two lemons were sufficient)
1 Tablespoon lemon zest (and two lemons zested to about this)
2 Tablespoons (28g) unsalted butter, softened to room temperature

Since the crust instructions went overboard: Add everything but the eggs and butter to a medium sauce pan. That would be this:

Over medium heat, bring it to a gentle boil. Turn heat to low. Whisk eggs. Temper them (slowly ladle a ladle-full of the about-to-be-custard into the eggs, whisking the entire time). Slowly add them to the custard mixture, whisking the entire time. Increase heat back to medium and bring to a low but thorough boil, whisking the entire time. Take off heat. Whisk in butter. Set aside. It’s custard. It likes whisking.

Meringue (can we fix the spelling of that word, please! Merrang)
5 large egg whites, at room temperature
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/2 cup (100g) granulated sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt

It’s merrang. Whip it, whip it good. Add sugar and salt after soft peaks. Whip to stiff peaks.

I cooked the custard during the weighted portion of the par bake. I whipped the merrang during the unweighted portion of the par bake. It was all ready to assemble when the crust came out of the oven. That’s the picture headlining the post.

Bake at 350 for 20-22 minutes, according to Sally. I did 15 because my oven has a hot spot and I wanted to rotate. It was nicely browned at that point, so I turned the oven off and let it sit in there for another 5.

It looks great:

It’s not for me, so I don’t know how it tastes. I’ll find out tomorrow after Crochet Group reviews it.

According to the Intertubes, merrang doesn’t keep well. This really should have been done in the morning, but there is no good stopping point in the middle, so overnight refrigeration it is. We’ll see.