Coconut Cream Pie Recipe

When requested to decide on between pie or cake, my reply is unequivocally pie. Although my favourite ones virtually all the time function ripe summer fruit, I do have a tender spot for coconut cream pie. Full of a wealthy custard and topped with flippantly sweetened whipped cream and a sprinkling of toasted flaked coconut, every chew is aromatic, nutty, and a delight to eat. It’s a easy pie to make, too—with a blind-baked crust on the prepared, all it’s a must to do is whisk collectively a custard filling, scrape it into your crust, and permit it to sit back till it’s set earlier than you high it with whipped cream and toasted coconut. 

Although it’s troublesome to hint the precise origins of coconut cream pie, there are recipes from the nineteenth century, just like the “cocoa-nut cream” in Mary Randolph’s 1824 e-book The Virginia Housewife and the “cocoa-nut pudding” in Eliza Leslie’s 1828 e-book Seventy-5 Receipts for Pastry, Truffles, and Sweetmeats, two creamy coconut confections that would have paved the way in which for what we now know as coconut cream pie. Maybe the earliest iteration of an precise coconut pie is the “cocoa-nut pie” discovered within the 1843 e-book Mrs. Ellis’s Housekeeping Made Easy, which asks its readers to painstakingly grate their very own contemporary coconut for the dessert.

Due to the labor concerned, coconut desserts seemingly didn’t turn into well-liked in the US till desiccated coconut turned broadly accessible. In her e-book BraveTart, Critical Eats’ personal Stella Parks writes at size a couple of man named Franklin Baker who, together with his son Frank Jr., determined to desiccate coconut for resale on the flip of the 20th century. The “enterprise was such a rousing success,” she notes, “that they deserted their earlier careers to enter the ‘cocoanut commerce’ collectively.” When the Twenties rolled round, the Bakers started to promote their coconut merchandise with a recipe for a meringue-topped coconut cream pie—a dessert that, in keeping with Stella, was “the cat’s meow” all through the Roaring Twenties. Someplace alongside the way in which, whipped cream ultimately changed the meringue.

The Finest Dairy to Use for Coconut Cream Pie

In contrast to lots of the coconut cream pie recipes at this time, which name for making the custard with some mixture of dairy—often milk, heavy cream, half-and-half, or evaporated milk—the Bakers’ pie used coconut milk completely for a extra pronounced coconut taste. For my coconut cream pie, I wished a filling that was luscious and had a transparent coconut taste with out being overly wealthy or candy. I examined a number of custards: one made totally with coconut milk, one made with a mix of coconut milk and complete milk, and one other with coconut milk and half-and-half. 

Whereas the custard made with simply coconut milk tasted probably the most, properly, coconutty, it was additionally probably the most one-dimensional of the three. The mixture of coconut milk and half-and-half was scrumptious, however wasn’t exponentially extra flavorful than the custard made with coconut milk and complete milk. As a result of coconut milk’s pure fat already make it so wealthy, I didn’t take a look at with heavy cream, particularly since I felt that the coconut milk and half-and-half combination already verged on being only a bit too creamy. The very best custard was the mixture of coconut milk with complete milk, which produced a filling that had a outstanding however balanced coconut taste and completely silky texture.

Making and Thickening the Custard

The custard filling is, primarily, a pastry cream: You mix your dairy (right here, a combination of complete milk and full-fat coconut milk) with sugar, salt, eggs, and starch, and cook dinner it over the stovetop till totally thickened. As Kristina Razon wrote in her crème patissiere recipe, the success of your pastry cream will depend upon whether or not you sufficiently warmth your custard base, which depends on starch and eggs as its thickeners. Warmth jumpstarts the method of gelatinization; when heated to 175ºF (79ºC), the starch molecules start to swell and the egg proteins start to coagulate, thickening the pastry cream.

Now, you may suppose that heating the custard to 175ºF could be sufficient to thicken the pastry cream. However yolks include an enzyme known as amylase, which may dissolve starch molecules over time and liquify your custard. “The answer to this downside,” wrote Kristina, “requires getting the pastry cream even hotter—to what we’d describe as a ‘bubble,’ with the combination at a temperature simply shy of boiling. Holding the pastry cream at a bubble whereas whisking continually for a minute or so deactivates the amylase in order that it’s not a menace to the construction of the custard.” In the event you’ve ever made pastry cream and chilled it—solely to return to a soupy mess within the fridge—it’s seemingly you didn’t cook dinner it lengthy sufficient and amylase obtained the perfect of you and your custard.

To beat amylase at its personal recreation, we’re going to convey our coconut custard base to a bubble and whisk it continually for a full minute to deactivate it. It might be tempting to stroll away, however whisking is crucial for a clean pastry cream, and the minute you cease whisking, you threat scorching your pastry cream. Toasted coconut is sweet, however no person desires coconut cream pie that tastes burned.

Sweetened vs. Unsweetened Shredded Coconut

There’s a purpose why most coconut cream pie recipes name for sweetened shredded coconut combined into the custard: it’s exponentially extra flavorful than unsweetened coconut. As somebody who fears way-too-sweet desserts, although, I used to be curious to see if utilizing unsweetened coconut within the filling would assist mood among the pie’s sweetness.

Tasting the 2 fillings side-by-side, the custard with the sweetened coconut had a way more pronounced tropical, nutty taste, whereas the filling with the unsweetened coconut was flat. Even after I retested by rising the quantity of sugar within the custard, it nonetheless felt missing. For a balanced and flavorful filling, I used sweetened shredded coconut, seasoned the custard generously with salt, and was aware of the quantity of sugar I integrated as a way to management its general sweetness.

The Finest Crust to Use for Coconut Cream Pie

As a result of the pie doesn’t require further baking after you’ve stuffed the crust with custard, it’s important to make use of a blind-baked pie crust. Right here, I’ve opted for Stella’s buttery, flaky pie crust, which will get its tenderness from a 1:1 ratio of butter to flour and, as a result of it’s made with all-purpose flour, has simply sufficient gluten to carry its form within the oven because it bakes. For extra tips about blind-baking, observe Stella’s suggestions and directions here.

Assembling and Chilling the Pie

Together with your filling made, the remaining is, shall I say… straightforward as pie? After the custard has cooled over an ice tub for half-hour, you’ll scrape it into your blind-baked crust, press plastic wrap over the floor of the custard to stop a pores and skin from forming, and refrigerate the pie till set. In the event you’d prefer to make the pie forward of time, you possibly can put together it up till this level and preserve it refrigerated for as much as three days. All that’s left to do is to high your dessert with whipped cream and toasted coconut flakes whenever you’re able to serve.