Key Lime Pie, Forget About the Calories.
When your friends request key lime pie, why not make it? After all, I do have key lime juice sitting around from a past pie. Yummy Stuff! Delic!
Who cares about the calories when the weekend rolls around? Key Lime Pie is one of my favorite pies to eat. It’s so easy to make, if you enjoy baking. The only challenge I found was toasting the coconut.You have to watch the coconut in the pan because it burns very quickly and if you put the hot coconut in the grinder, it clumps! OY! Such Dilemas!
The recipe I used called for either Key Lime Juice or regular lime juice with lime extract. Do yourself a favor and never taste the lime juice unless you like the flavor of plain juice that’s very tart!
I cannot post a recipe because I combined 2 recipes and did my own thing with the crust. I added vanilla crackers, coconut and coconut shortening to the graham cracker crust. Otherwise it seemed boring with plain graham cracker crust.
History of Key Lime Pie:
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- The Ingredient Challenge: Because cows were scarce and refrigeration didn’t exist, fresh milk spoiled quickly in the Florida heat. Gail Borden’s invention of canned, sweetened condensed milk (patented in 1856) provided a shelf-stable alternative.
- The Key Lime: The small, highly acidic, and aromatic lime (introduced by Spanish explorers centuries prior) grew wild throughout the Keys.
- Fishermen Roots: According to local legend, Key West sponge fishermen out at sea mixed these ingredients—along with stale Cuban bread—in the sun to create an early, no-bake version of the sweet-and-tangy treat.
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- Most local traditions attribute the perfected, baked pie to a woman known as “Aunt Sally,” who was a cook for Florida’s first millionaire, William Curry.
- She allegedly substituted local Key limes in a lemon pie recipe to create the iconic dessert, which quickly became a staple in homes and on restaurant menus.
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- For a long time, the pie was passed down via word-of-mouth in the Keys.
- In the 1930s, food historians discovered that the Borden Company (the condensed milk producers) published a recipe for “Magic Lemon Cream Pie” in 1931.
- Many culinary experts believe Floridians adapted Borden’s New York recipe, swapping the lemon for native Key limes to create the definitive pie we know today.
- Traditionally, the pie relies entirely on the chemical reaction between the acid of the lime juice and the proteins in the egg yolks and condensed milk to set, removing the need to bake the filling.
- It was officially designated the official state pie of Florida in 1994
- Reference: https://www.google.com/search?q=history+of+keylimepie&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS834US834&oq=history+of+keylimepie&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIJCAEQABgNGIAEMgkIAhAAGA0YgAQyCQgDEAAYDRiABDINCAQQABiGAxiABBiKBTINCAUQABiGAxiABBiKBdIBCTYxMjVqMGoxNagCCLACAfEF74axnDnP_9o&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8