Banana and coconut cream pies are two of our favorites.
I haven’t baked a pie since about 1980…but I do good ones. And I’m going to do another.
AS A RULE: with pies where you need a pie shell—start the day before.
And do not use ‘diet’ ingredients: use whole milk, real eggs, real vanilla, real butter.
LATE, THE DAY BEFORE you bake the pie.
this is for a single-crust pie, ie, only one bottom. You can safely double these recipes… [Not all recipes can be doubled safely, esp when they involve baking powder: these aren’t that kind.]
2 cups white flour
1 tsp salt
CUT IN 2/3 cup chilled Crisco or similar: 2 tbs chilled butter. Chilled cold shortening is important. This should not melt AT ALL when mixed. You take a pastry knife or wide-tined fork, and ‘cut in’ the shortening into the flour, ie, mix it until it looks like a stack of floury fat bee-bees or peas, each with a shortening/butter center. Sprinkle the stack with 4 tablespoons of ice water, stirring the bee-bees about with your fingers or a knife. If you still have some totally dry, you can fudge as much as 1 tablespoon more water onto it, but no more than that. Hint, sprinkle off your fingers, do not pour water in one spot!
Very gently ball it up, put in ziploc in fridge for about 5-8 hours, or overnight.
THE NEXT DAY:
heat oven to 450 degrees.
For each pie: flour your roller to prevent sticking. Lay the balled dough onto a floured board or piece of parchment paper and roll it out very gently (do not press, let the roller do the work!) to a flat, even round: do NOT attempt to put a cracked-off edge piece back onto the main crust: save it for patches if needed, or tuck it into the middle of the folds when you do the one-time fold-up: if you try to put it onto the other crust, it will stick to your roller and become a multiplied problem. When flat, you may double it east to west and north to south only once. Then re-roll it. Stop. Fold in half, gently lift it into pie plate, and open the fold to full. Crimp edge between thumb and forefinger, like a pinch. Then prick the bottom all over with a fork, about 10 times. {This lets any bubbles escape.)
Place both pie crusts in oven, middle rack, heat for about 10-12 minutes. Remove, let stand and cool. You can be onto the next part of this operation.
MAKING THE FILLING:
FOR EACH PIE: put in a saucepan
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup flour
1/2 tsp salt…..and have ready 2 cups whole milk
Put water in a skillet, boil it: set the saucepan into the boiling skillet as water boils, ie, your ingredients do not touch the water, which is only to keep the bottom of the saucepan from having the sugar/flour/milk mixture gum up. Stir constantly as you add 2 cups whole milk each pie. Cook 10 minutes this way.
Remove the pan. Beat up 3 egg yolks each pie. Pour half the hot mixture into the egg yolks. Stir until smooth, then pour egg/mix portion back into saucepan with rest and put it back on the skillet with the boiling water. Stir endlessly until you find the mixture thickening (this is caused by the flour and the egg and the heat)…
Remove from heat, and for each pie, add 2 tablespoons real butter, 2 teaspoons real vanilla, and stir until mixed. Fill pie crusts, and stir into one slices of banana, until all covered. Stir into the other, if you made 2, flaked coconut.
Make your meringue: set oven at 225.
a mixer is good for this one, or it builds muscle. This involves, per pie, 4 egg whites, 1 teaspoon of vanilla, and 1 cups powdered sugar (sifted, to be sure the measure is accurate.) Start by beating the egg whites and vanilla, and slowly add the powdered sugar until the mix, if teased with spoon, stands in peaks that do not ebb down or flatten. scatter flaked coconut onto the coconut pie.
Bake at 225 with door slightly opened until you see the meringue peaks all browned. Let the door stand open, turn off oven, allow to set 5 minutes before setting pie out onto stove top.
Allow to cool entirely before cutting.
Enjoy.
A delicious labor of love! Congratulations to all!
make sure that there are no residual oils in the mixing bowl you use to make the meringue, otherwise the oil breaks the surface tension of the bubbles in the meringue. BTW, how much flaked coconut for the filling, and not sure of the banana, either, one slices? perhaps 1 cup banana slices? One sliced banana? other than that, the directions are pretty darned clear.
Firm bananas, for my taste, about one banana per 9″ pie. and the coconut, about half a cup: go with moist coconut, so as not to steal moisture from the custard.
That’s what I get for leaving the bunch of bananas at home. Will have to eat one tomorrow at brunch instead of first thing in the morning.
Much congratulations to Jane for another successful loop around the sun, and to a certain simple pie maker.
Thank goodness you didn’t have to wrestle those four and twenty blackbirds…. Feathers in a pie would be so inconvenient….
Happy Birthday to Jane 🙂
yes, birthday wishes and great pie day! 😀
Yes, indeed! Many many happy returns. The pie sounds wonderful. those are my favorites also.
Have you ever tried rolling the crust dough out between two pieces of waxed paper? My mother in law has a crust recipe that uses vegetable oil, so it is quite sticky, but the waxed paper trick works a treat.
The waxed paper is a good trick: it gets it to the pieplate un-torn. This recipe is also, while delicate, not self-sticky and if you don’t get it too thin, it lifts fine. Flouring your board is a good trick for avoiding a torn crust, too. The surface flour won’t hurt it.
CJ,
I wish I could import your baking here for a weekend. Those custard pies sound glorious. I guesss I’ll have to send readyGuy or readyDaughter out to find a coconut custard pie, as I am now craving one in the worst way. I still can’t stand long enough to work a pie crust and the pain pills would interfere with my being able to adequately execute your very clear instructions. It’s hard enough to heat a bowl of soup for lunch. My physical therapist stated that I could start walking around the house without either a cane or walker starting next week, but under no circumstances adventure outside without an aid because the balance on cyborg knee is still so-so.
Well, you can do it as a celebration for getting OUT of therapy—which is better than my father did with his hip, climbing a 6 foot ladder to fix a drape and falling with ladder and drape. If it’s of any encouragement—he was undamaged. Those things are pretty sturdy. You just have to let them heal.
Your recipe brings back memories of my aunt’s fabulous chocolate meringue pie. My dad made lattice crust fruit pies. He used the edge of the wheel that turns the beaters of an egg beater to cut his lattice strips so they looked like they had been cut with pinking shears. One of my earliest memories is of him at the kitchen table cutting lattice strips with a big eggbeater.
To Jane: HIPY PAPY BTHUTHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY, and many happy returns of the day.
can I just say – 1 whole teaspoon of salt??? I would put a pinch of salt in pastry ….. 😀
just noticed …
@ CJ, a question, please. Some time ago, I think it was you who gave a recipe for either sesame or peanut chicken, Asian cuisine. (I don’t have it in front of me and I am exceedingly scattered today, or I’d know for sure.) The recipe called for a fairly standard sort of noodle, whole wheat? Some type of wheat or flour that did not kick in when I went to the store this morning. Er, what kind of noodles were they, please? (And yes, I’m 45 and having a senior moment, it seems.) I’ll either substitute what I have this weekend, or wait until next grocery trip next week. 🙂 And thanks in advance. Nice brown noodle, just right for the dish, common enough, though I will have to hunt a little in the noodles or the Asian / international aisle at Kroger’s. 🙂 Hmm, I think a side order of gingko vitamins might be in order.
I doubt I’ll get a pie made this weekend, so I bought a lemon meringue pie. — But I got spring roll wrappers, because the spring rolls you’d mentioned sounded ideal.
And blast it, I forgot salad dressing as well as marshmallows. Not going back. My brain will have to wake up and pay attention. No, I wouldn’t want to put my butt down at the coms board, even though I could probably get that (if I spoke any Compact language, that is). — Going to make myself nap this afternoon. Can’t believe how scattered I seem to be, and I actually slept halfway OK the past two nights.
Huh, on the plus side, despite lack of review in about a month, I think my rusty French and Spanish are doing a little better than I’d feared.
Dry udon noodles are particularly easy to handle. If you can get the 3-pack, each little bundle of noodles serves two reasonably. As a variation, concentrate the sauce on the noodles, so you get 2 flavors within the dish. If you find the noodles are trying to ‘set up’ on you, add some Swanson’s Chicken Stock. No msg, and it will not change the flavor of your dish. I keep the stuff in my fridge constantly as a quick repair kit when a dish starts to stick or dry out or congeal.
Oooh, there’s another one! I thought it was only me. 😉
When I was about 12 I asked Mom, “If it’s my birthday, don’t I get a say in what I get? I don’t particularly like cake. I’d rather have a blueberry pie!” Mom agreed, and that’s the way it was since.
Thank you, I’ll hunt up the udon. I should have some chicken stock (and some vegetable stock) on hand.
As for pies, next time I want a lemon meringue pie, I’d better make my own. The store-bought, brand name pie was nearly all meringue and barely any lemon. I think they’ve cut back. Their other pies are fine. Hmm, lemon custard pie…sounds good, but I’m waiting on chicken strips baking in the oven for a late lunch. 🙂 Part of them will be eaten with whatever I throw together, and part will likely be chopped up for a salad or for the spring rolls from the earlier post. Depends how lazy or how motivated I get! (Pretty lazy today….)