Pie #5: Classic Chess Pie

For the Super Bowl I decided to make a pie, Classic Chess Pie. So, what is a chess pie?

According to Google it’s: a pie filled with a rich mixture of eggs, butter, and sugar, often with additional flavorings. In this case, lemon is the extra flavor.

The start of the crust went easy. I decided to forego the food processor this time and make the crust all by hand. The dough turned out great, although I had to roll it out twice. It turned out to be just the right amount of crust and I only had a little piece left over. Usually, I have a lot of scraps left.

Now prebaking the pie crust was another story. There are several steps to follow to prebake a pie.  First, I had to put the pie in the freezer for 15 minutes. Then after that I had to make a foil mold of the pie and but beans in the foil. The beans act as a weight to weigh down the crust so it does not puff up. It called for beans to fill the pie plate completely, but I did not have enough beans, so I just made do with what I had.

After 15 minutes I had to take the beans and foil off and then poke holes in the bottom of the crust and cook for another 20 minutes. During this time I missed a key part. You were supposed to check on the pie during this 20 minutes and I did not. So I pulled the pie out of the oven and it was a little puffy. To fix this, it suggests taking the back of a spoon and push down the crust without breaking it. I did it and that seemed to help. I then had to break an egg to get the egg white and thankful I have an egg white separator, and then put the egg whites over ONLY the holes you made and then bake that for another 2 minutes.

I will say right now I’m not the biggest fan of prebaking crust. That is one thing I will have to master. 

Finally, I was done with crust and I could work on the filling. By this time I had been working on this pie for a while and was honestly ready to be done. That being said, I looked at the ingredients and noticed that the recipe called for ROOM TEMPATURE butter. Well yeah, my butter was in the fridge. So what now? Well, I got the amount of butter it called for and put it in a pan and cooked the butter a little bit. I just helped the butter reach “room temperature” faster. Right? I will say I did remember to have the eggs at room temperature, so, I did have that going for me. I had to use the mixer with this pie. This was the first time for me to use a mixer on this pie journey.  It was interesting. I could not figure out what speeds I needed and thankfully my hubby was there to come to my rescue and help me figure out what speed my mixer needed to be at. 

As I was putting the ingredients into the mixer, Joshua, my husband, noticed that there was a lot of lemon zest. So he asked me, “How much of the lemon did you zest?” I replied quickly, “Till I saw the lemon part.” EKK… I should not have done that! Way to much lemon zest. Apparently I am supposed to zest only the skin. OOPS!

The filling turned out pretty good and looked great.

Hello Results: Don’t pick Super Bowl Night to make a pie. Make sure you have enough beans to weigh down the pie crust. Ease up on the zesting of the lemon. If I see the inside of the lemon I have gone TOO far. I did order a Lemon Zester but still do not have it; but, I will use lemon zester next time. Overall, not my favorite tasting pie but that might be because of too much lemon. That makes five pies, so … countdown please… 295 to go!