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Aug. 22nd, 2012 12:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickToday we're going to talk about working towards a better coconut cream pie. I'm sure that you all want to know
Coconut cream pie, despite suffering from a paucity of crust, is one of my more favorite eat-at-restaurants pies. It's a pain in the ass to make at home (dirties a lot more containers than a fruit pie, is not done in an hour flat, requires the use of a whisk *AND* beaters, for fuck's sake) and yet I love the pudding filling of coconut goodness and I typically don't miss the crust that would have been present in an entirely-pastry pie like apple or cherry because nobody misses baked crust that has been sitting in a cold case for six hours or more, gently sogging into inedibility as the custard leaches into it. Unless I have very good reason to expect anything else (eg. fantastic pie innards), I just eat the meringue and filling and abandon the crust entirely when eating restaurant coconut cream pie.
Bought coconut cream pies suffer, in my mind, from being insipidly sweet (most pastries in the real world are insipidly sweet to my way of tasting) and not tasting enough like coconut. The recipe I have for coconut cream at home has a similar (but less egregiously offensive) problem. So, I thought to myself that I could do better. You know how that goes, right?
I thought on the less-sweet problem first. I'm pretty sure that there has to be a certain amount of sugar in the pudding ingredients so that the stuff will set up. I'm also vaguely afraid of winding up with coconut soup if I mess with the pudding recipe. The coconut, though, does not have to be sugared. You can make a coconut cream pie with freshly grated coconut from an actual coconut you have opened and peeled and grated with your own little hands... but doing that once is enough for most people. I decided to rinse the bagged (baker's secret) coconut until the water ran clear on the grounds that this would remove the offending sugar. It worked well. I drained the coconut thoroughly and proceeded onward.
Since I'm a leap-before-you-looker at times like this, I had rinsed the entire 7 oz bag without stopping to note that the recipe called for a mere 3.5 oz of coconut. I wasn't going to save the rest of the rinsed coconut for later, so I decided to toss it all into the pudding.
And speaking of the pudding, I figured that I could substitute 1 cup of actual coconut milk for the cow milk (both milks are largely water) and go forward with the recipe like that for a more coconut flavored pudding. This would be the "in the asian or ethnic section of the grocery store" coconut milk, not that syrupy stuff that comes premixed for pina coladas.
How'd it go? Quite nicely, thank you. It was delightful. You might try it yourself. Good luck. And you're welcome.
Coconut cream pie, despite suffering from a paucity of crust, is one of my more favorite eat-at-restaurants pies. It's a pain in the ass to make at home (dirties a lot more containers than a fruit pie, is not done in an hour flat, requires the use of a whisk *AND* beaters, for fuck's sake) and yet I love the pudding filling of coconut goodness and I typically don't miss the crust that would have been present in an entirely-pastry pie like apple or cherry because nobody misses baked crust that has been sitting in a cold case for six hours or more, gently sogging into inedibility as the custard leaches into it. Unless I have very good reason to expect anything else (eg. fantastic pie innards), I just eat the meringue and filling and abandon the crust entirely when eating restaurant coconut cream pie.
Bought coconut cream pies suffer, in my mind, from being insipidly sweet (most pastries in the real world are insipidly sweet to my way of tasting) and not tasting enough like coconut. The recipe I have for coconut cream at home has a similar (but less egregiously offensive) problem. So, I thought to myself that I could do better. You know how that goes, right?
I thought on the less-sweet problem first. I'm pretty sure that there has to be a certain amount of sugar in the pudding ingredients so that the stuff will set up. I'm also vaguely afraid of winding up with coconut soup if I mess with the pudding recipe. The coconut, though, does not have to be sugared. You can make a coconut cream pie with freshly grated coconut from an actual coconut you have opened and peeled and grated with your own little hands... but doing that once is enough for most people. I decided to rinse the bagged (baker's secret) coconut until the water ran clear on the grounds that this would remove the offending sugar. It worked well. I drained the coconut thoroughly and proceeded onward.
Since I'm a leap-before-you-looker at times like this, I had rinsed the entire 7 oz bag without stopping to note that the recipe called for a mere 3.5 oz of coconut. I wasn't going to save the rest of the rinsed coconut for later, so I decided to toss it all into the pudding.
And speaking of the pudding, I figured that I could substitute 1 cup of actual coconut milk for the cow milk (both milks are largely water) and go forward with the recipe like that for a more coconut flavored pudding. This would be the "in the asian or ethnic section of the grocery store" coconut milk, not that syrupy stuff that comes premixed for pina coladas.
How'd it go? Quite nicely, thank you. It was delightful. You might try it yourself. Good luck. And you're welcome.
