LiZ Adair's Sour Cream Lemon Pie

I had a small commercial bakery for most of the 80s and part of the 90s. My main focus was home-made pies for restaurants, and I made about 300 pies from scratch each week to supply twenty restaurants.

That was a long time ago, and nowadays, holidays are my only pie-making times. The family usually requests banana cream and sour cream lemon. You can find recipes for banana cream pie pretty much anywhere, but the sour cream lemon pie recipe is my own.

Today I’m going to share it with you just in case you’d like to have it for your Easter feast.

This is a one-crust pie. The crust is baked first and the filling is cooked and poured into the pie shell. You can either buy a frozen pie shell or make your own. I blogged about making a tender, flaky crust when I wrote about how to have a successful apple pie service project. If you want to make your own crust, just follow those directions for one batch of pie crust mix, and that should equal two pie shells. Or, you can purchase a graham cracker crust.

This recipe will fill a nine-inch pie shell—and by the way, I used a store-bought crust for the one in the picture.

In a heavy saucepan or double boiler, mix together:

1½ cups sour cream
1 ½ cups sugar

When they’re well blended, add

4 eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition

When the eggs are thoroughly mixed in, add grated zest from two lemons (or limes--I actually make my pies with limes rather than lemons, because I always have limes in the house).

Then, dissolve ¼ cup cornstarch in ¼ cup water and add to sour cream/sugar mixture.

Place on the stove burner and stir frequently until mixture comes to a boil and thickens.

With a saucepan, turn the stove to a range between medium and low. Use medium-high heat with a double boiler.

If your burner is too hot, the filling will scorch. If that happens, don’t despair. It won’t ruin it. As I was making the pie pictured at left, I got distracted and scorched it. If you look closely, you can see the little brown flecks. Just act as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be and people will still rave about it.

When the mixture thickens, pull it off the stove and add ½ cup fresh-squeezed lemon (or lime) juice. This makes a very tangy pie. You may want to taste as you go along, as you may not like the pie as tart as my family likes it.

Pour it into the pie shell. Put a covering of saran directly on the filling, but don’t pull it over the crust. This will keep a skin from forming on the top of the filling.

Put it in the fridge to cool for at least several hours.

Serve with a garnish of whipped cream.

Let me know how it turns out!

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