Recipe: Key Lime Pie

[resonant]

julad asked for this, and I figured that if I was going to type it up, I might as well share it with everyone.

It's from "The Best Recipe," by the editors of Cook's Illustrated magazine.

And I need to make a plug for the book here. If you're an enthusiastic cook, but you learned how to cook in a sort of haphazard way, you'll find all sorts of marvelous stuff here. For instance: The best utensil for mixing crumbs and butter together to make a graham cracker crust is a fork. The best way to boil eggs is to put them in a saucepan, add enough water to cover them by an inch, heat them on high just until the second they start boiling, remove them from heat, cover them, and let them sit for twelve minutes; this avoids underdone eggs, the green-yolk problem, and the finicky effort to adjust boiling time based on altitude, hard water, etc.

One of the Amazon.com reviewers complained about the book because the typical ingredient list goes something like: Broccoli. Salt. "Where are the spices?" he asked. "Where are the sauce ideas?" But he was missing the point. The point is, there are ten thousand magazines and books out there to tell you that broccoli is good with lemon and parmesan, and good with olive oil and sauteed garlic, and good with hollandaise sauce if you've got that kind of patience, and so on -- but only this one will tell you that the tastiest way to cook broccoli is to boil it in heavily salted water for exactly three minutes.

Right. Sorry. I forget myself sometimes.

Key Lime Pie
from Cook's Illustrated

Serves 8

Lime filling:

4 teaspoons grated zest plus 1/2 cup strained juice from 3 to 4 limes
4 large egg yolks
1 14-ounce can sweetened condensed milk

Graham cracker crust:

11 full-size graham crackers, processed to fine crumbs (1 1/4 cups)
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

Whipped cream topping

3/4 cup heavy cream, chilled
1/4 cup confectioners' sugar
1/2 lime, sliced paper-thin and dipped in sugar (optional)

Filling: Whisk zest and yolks in medium bowl until tinted light green, about 2 minutes. Beat in condensed milk, then juice; set aside at room temperature to thicken.

Crust: Adjust oven rack to center position and heat oven to 325 degrees. Mix crumbs and sugar in medium bowl. Add butter; stir with fork until well blended. Scrape mixture into 9-inch pie pan; press crumbs over bottom and up sides of pan to form even crust. Bake until lightly browned and fragrant, about 15 minutes. Transfer pan to wire rack; cool to room temperature, about 20 minutes.

Pour lime filling into crust; bake until center is set, yet wiggly when jiggled, 15 to 17 minutes. Return pie to wire rack; cool to room temperature. Refrigerate until well-chilled, at least 3 hours. (Can be covered with lightly oiled or oil-sprayed plastic wrap laid directly on filling and refrigerated up to 1 day.)

Whipped cream: Up to 2 hours before serving, whip cream in medium bowl to very soft peaks. Adding confectioners' sugar 1 tablespoon at a time, continue whipping to just-stiff peaks. Decoratively pipe whipped cream over filling or spread evenly with rubber spatula.



Notes from Cook's: Their "trained testers" were unable to tell the difference between Key limes and Persian limes, which is good news, because Persian limes are easier to find and easier to juice.

Also, don't reduce the sugar in the whipped cream; they made it very sweet to offset the tartness of the filling.

Notes from Res: No, I don't know why you have to bake the crust, then cool it, then bake it again with the filling in it. But this is Cook's we're talking about, so you can bet they tested it and found that it made a difference.

The best tool for removing zest from a lime is a microplane grater. It's pretty cheap, and I use mine every single day. It's wonderful for Parmesan cheese and for garlic. I haven't minced a garlic clove since 1999.

My father-in-law says you can choose the best-tasting, juiciest limes by looking for the ones with the smoothest skin.

The filling is yellow with flecks of green zest. People who are expecting the uniform green of a store-bought key lime pie find it startling. It also, if you look at it wrong, has an unsettling resemblance to some sort of schmancy herbal mustard. But it tastes good.

Also, the lime slices dipped in sugar look gorgeous, but they turn bitter by the next day. So don't try to do them in advance, and if you have pie left over, take the garnishing limes off it and eat them before you put it in the refrigerator.