medtran49
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I did a couple of things differently than a lot of recipes. Craig and I are not fond of graham crackers, so I made a vanilla wafer crust and I added zest to the filling. It really added a zing that cut the sweetness of the meringue. I also have written this recipe up with double the filling that I used because it's kind of skimpy, especially given how many egg whites I used (leftovers from the egg yolk raviolos I made), but, regardless, the filling from the original recipe only filled the pie plate up about half way. I would have made more, but didn't have another can of sweetened condensed milk.
Crust
1-1/2 cups fine vanilla wafer crumbs (45-50 wafers)
2 Tbsp sugar
5 Tbsp melted butter
Mix crumbs and sugar together, stir in butter and mix until well blended. Press crumb mixture into a 9" pie plate (compact it firmly) that has been lightly sprayed with cooking spray or lightly greased. Bake in a 350 degree F oven for 8-10 minutes, let cool slightly.
Key Lime Filling
6 egg yolks
28 ounces sweetened condensed milk (NOT evaporated)
1 cup key lime juice
2 Tbsp lime zest (microplane the zest BEFORE you juice the limes)
Mix the egg yolks, SCM, key lime juice and zest until well blended. Pour into the slightly cooled crust (I made the filing while the crust was baking) and bake for 15-20 minutes at 350 F until center is just barely jiggly. Let cool.
Italian meringue
6 egg whites at room temperature
1-1/2 cups sugar
3/4 cups water
3/4 tsp cream of tartar OR 3/4 tsp lime juice
Gently mix sugar and water in a saucepan, bring to a boil over medium high heat, stirring fairly often. Once it boils, stop stirring and brush down sides of pan with a wet pastry brush if crystals start to form. Heat mixture until it reaches 240 degrees F using a candy/oil thermometer or an instant read. In the meanwhile, in a stand mixer, whip egg whites with cream of tartar OR lime juice on medium until soft peaks form. You want to stat the egg whites beating shortly after the sugar/water mixture starts to boil so that they will be ready roughly at the same time. Once they are both ready, with the mixer running, SLOWLY start to stream in the syrup mixture. You can increase the stream slowly as the eggs absorb the syrup and start to cook. When you are done, you should just be getting hard peaks. Don't over or under beat. Be CAREFUL with the sugar syrup, it can burn badly!
Spoon meringue onto pie, spreading to crust edges and making nice swirls. The egg whites are already cooked because of the sugar syrup so you can either use a torch to brown or bake at 350 F for 10-12 minutes. I did use the torch method, but I think next time I will bake and then use the torch if necessary because the meringue is really, really soft. I'll try and get a picture of a piece of pie, but it just fell apart the night I made it because everything was still soft.
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