Talking Food with Cory Bahr: Lemon Pie

Hey, y'all, I'm Chef Cory Bahr and we're here at the kitchen at Parish Restaurant in downtown Monroe. We're going to make one of my favorite desserts. It's my grandfather's recipe for lemon pie, which you may not know a lot of people don't know this, but wintertime is citrus season in Louisiana and we've got great lemons, limes, oranges, all those things coming in. And this is really the prime time for our lemon pie. So this is our pastry chef Savannah. Y'all seen her before. She's gonna walk you through the recipe and then we'll, I'll come back and we'll finish it all up.

Alright, so right now we're going to start with our lemon pie filling, we're going to start with about two cans worth of sweetened condensed milk. There's no sugar in this recipe. So all your sweetness is gonna come from your sweetened condensed milk. Then we're gonna add one in one quarter fresh squeezed lemon juice, and then very gently whisk. And what's really interesting is the acid from the lemon juice will interact with the dairy in the sweet condensed milk and it'll give you that really thick custard texture. Next, we're going to have eight egg yolks. whisk them in. And last but not least, the zest of two lemons. We whisk and we whisk. Now I've got a homemade graham cracker crust here. Don't feel bad if you use store bought, it's perfectly fine. What's special about the graham cracker crust I do at the restaurant, I add milk powder to it, which a lot of people wouldn't think of, but it actually adds a really nice texture to the crust, as well as a much more like rounded flavor. So I highly recommend that and I also add salt, which is something a lot of people don't do. If you do make a homemade crust that it's completely cooled before you add your fillings. You don't want to scramble those egg yolks. So that's that. Here's our pie going in the oven 325 for about 30 minutes, make sure to check on it about 25 just to see where you're at. Alright, so I've just pulled our lemon pie out of the oven. If you take a good look, you can see that it's gotten a little puffy around the edges, which is a good sign. And if you jiggle it someone's got slight jiggle, which is fine, it'll set as it cools, but those are both really good indicators of this pie is done.

So there's our lemon pie. It's been rested. Savannah, you know, makes many of these every week and people just rave about it. It's been on the menu since day one. And one of the things that really sets it apart is how we put our meringue on top. Maybe not quite as great as hers. It's pretty good.

There you have it. That's our lemon meringue pie. Hey, if you want to cook this recipe for yourself, go to KNOE.com and click on Talking Food.