Banana Cream

This really must have been my week to get a lesson on pie crusts. On Saturday my lemon meringue crust took three tries... and the banana cream pie was a MAJOR adventure. It started out fairly simple. I was making two single crust pies so I just went ahead and doubled my recipe... Life was good. I made the crusts early in the day, flattened them into rounds, and then stuck them in the refrigerator. It wasn't until about 8:30 when I got back to my crusts. Now when I had been kneading the dough a bit I had noticed that it was moister than usual... I didn't think too much of it at the time. (BIG MISTAKE.) It was 8:30, I was rolling out my pie crusts, and it wasn't working. I kept on trying to roll them out and they kept on sticking to EVERYTHING. I just used more and more flour and eventually I got two decent pie crusts in the tins and into the refrigerator to wait for 30 minutes to be pre-baked.

Now seems to be as good a time as any to explain how pre-baking actually works. If you were just to take a pie crust and stick it into the oven for 30 minutes... you'd be in big trouble. What would happen is your crust would bubble like no other and you'd have this THING that wasn't flat at all. (Am I speaking from experience? Unfortunately, yes... But that was like two years ago.) How to prevent this? Well the answer to that is actually rather ingenious. When pre-baking a pie you take it and line it with aluminum foil. You have to be sure to pat the aluminum foil down on the bottom and up along the sides. Then you're supposed to take pie weights to weigh it down... I don't have pie weights. Instead I use black beans! It works well enough. So putting the pie crust into the oven for pre-baking it looks something like this:

It might look ridiculous, but it works. So you bake it like this for 20 minutes and then pull it out briefly. At this point you check under the aluminum foil. If the crust looks wet then you need to keep baking it. So you put the pie back in (with the foil and beans still on it) for another 5 minutes. Then... you check it again. Typically after the extra five minutes the moisture will be gone and you'll have a partially pre-baked pie. For some reason that wasn't working for me. I tried ANOTHER 5 minutes... Nope, still wet. Another 5 minutes? Two minutes? Another two minutes? FINALLY the moisture was gone. For a partially pre-baked pie that's where you stop. However, I needed fully baked pie crusts. So for that you take away the aluminum foil and beans and bake it for another 7-10 minutes. Typically this will result in a lovely golden brown crust (it worked well enough with my lemon meringue pie!). When the 7 minutes were up and I pulled my crusts out I was shocked. First of all, they had sort of slumped, and shrunk, and gotten slightly BURNT! I was SOOO confused. It had taken forever to get them to stop looking WET and just like that they had BURNT?! These are the crusts I was faced with:

Well, there was only one thing I could do... try try again. At this point it was 9:45 and I was getting tired. (NEVER leave a pie for the last thing to do that day.) I began mixing my ingredients for my new pie crusts and suddenly had a revelation. I knew what was wrong with wrong with my previous pie crusts. When doubling the crust recipe I had left out an entire CUP of flour... That makes a BIG difference. Because I had so much more moisture in the dough than flour it had taken forever to get the pie to not look wet. Then once all that moisture was gone the crust was able to just burn! I was VERY mad at myself. With my new crusts I was EXTREMELY CAREFUL. Even so they also proved to be difficult to roll out (I'm not sure why) and it was all a very horrible nightmare. In the end I did manage to get two new pie crusts rolled out, and baked, and they both looked like this:

To offer another comparison to my original crusts... When I was taking one of the old crusts out of the pie tin (since I had to use the tin for my new crusts) it actually cracked on me!

Let's move on from pie crusts. As the crusts were baking I was working on the banana cream filling. It's a lot like doing a lemon meringue filling. You add the ingredients and cook on the stove until it bubbles and thickens into this:

Once I had my two final pie crusts done I was able to move on to my bananas. What you do is cut the bananas into 1/2 inch slices. Then you lay 2/3s of the bananas down directly on the pie crust. You take the rest of the bananas and mix them in with the filling... and then spread that across the pie. Then it's into the refrigerator for at least four hours before doing the final step: making whipped cream and spreading that over the top. By the time I got the pie into the refrigerator (without the whipped cream) it was 12:30. I woke up at 5:00 the next day to do the whipped cream. Unfortunately with all of the chaos surrounding the crusts I never did get a picture of the finished pie...

This pie was... tough. Not because it's a hard pie (I'm learning that most pies are actually ridiculously simple!) but because of the entire crust mess. One up side to the entire thing was that the crusts taking forever gave me a chance to make a pie rubric which my ELI class actually used the next day. (They seemed to like the pie.)

Hopefully with this I'll be able to get a better feel for how I'm doing with my pies... and if I'm actually improving. It'll also be fun to see what pie are people's favorites! As for what I've learned with this pie... Be CAREFUL when doubling a recipe, one cup of flour makes a BIG difference, don't put off baking a pie until late at night, and make sure you take PICTURES! Oh, and I really do like banana cream pie.