Dessert hacking: Overhauling a lemon merengue pie that didn’t set.
A neighbor gave us a big bag of lemons and my wife asked me if I wanted anything made with lemons. So of course I asked for a lemon merengue pie. With making everthing from scratch it took her several hours on saturday. I looked great, but it never set up. The filling was very liquidy, about like thin maple syrup. After some analysis, we decided that the ingredients were correct, but that the double boiler didn’t have enough water in the bottom half and the filling didn’t get hot enough. We thought about semi-freezing it, but I decided to tear it down and fix it.
First I coat a plate with some spray oil, merengue is very sticky and tears easily. Using two people and three oiled spatulas we lifted the merengue off in one piece on to the plate. Then we poured the filling into a heavy bottomed pot.
I felt that we were going to loose some filling in the pot and utensils, so I made up a little cornstarch with the juice of another lemon and added it in.
We brought it up to a boil, then let it cool. The reassembly was fairly straight forward, we just poured the filling back in and slid the merengue back on. Sorry about not having a pic of the finished product, but I’d been looking forward to pie for a long time…
