While my gâteau gently weeps

[matthewdaly]

My experience with pie has mostly reached a comfortable low-grade mastery. Not that I'm a professional pastry chef, but I can make a banana cream pie out of flour, sugar, salt, butter, water, eggs, vanilla, and bananas with my eyes closed. I don't intend to come across as smug, but I don't quite get the notion that crusts are frighteningly difficult. Maybe they were fifty years ago, but with a food processor and a pie crust bag it really isn't any harder than bread. I wish I could get into online videography *kicks Vista* so I could make some YouTube tutorials for newbie geek cooks like me.

What I evidently can't do is meringue. I gather that lots of people have trouble with it, but argh the weeping! I've overcooked the pies, I've pre-cooked the egg whites, I think they only thing I haven't tried is locking the pie into a closet with a dehumidifier. Don't think I won't. What's your secret?

Comments

[deane]

I've only tried to make meringue twice. The first time I didn't really grok just how serious they were when they said that you shouldn't let any egg yolk whatsoever get in with the whites. I swear, it was just a tiny speck. Who knew? (Don't answer that.)

The next time I added sugar too soon. The instructions had said to beat the whites until they formed stiff peaks. Looked stiff to me, but apparently not. It still turned out reasonably well, just a bit less body that I would have liked.

It sounds like the problem you're having is that the meringue doesn't cook all the way through. Is that it?

[matthewdaly]

True dat about the yolk. I didn't know either until the second time it happened. The recipes focused on how the bowl has to be immaculately clean but that was it. I am not proud to say that I yelled at an inanimate object over how a speck of yolk can ruin a meringue. My egg separation strategy is now ridiculously over-engineered.

The meringue not cooking all the way through is the crux. I gather the heat doesn't get to the center and then it breaks back down to sweet egg whites when the pie cools. The common suggestion is to add the meringue quickly while the custard is still hot from the stove so that the heat comes up from the custard as well as from the oven, but that still leaves a lot of room for improvement.

And, actually, I was way overboard in denouncing my latest experiment, because it turned out that it was only a half-teaspoon of leakage instead of multiple tablespoons and it wound up being the most perfect meringue pie I have made to date. So the path to glory involves putting the custard into the crust, baking THAT for a few minutes to heat the custard even more, then pulling it out and adding the meringue and then cooking that for another X minutes. I wound up mildly overcooking it and it wound up with the spattered Coke droplet effect on top, but very little leakage. Seems like a promising avenue.