Thursday, April 2, 2009

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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12 comments:

Bekkieann said...

Mmmm, now if someone would just make one for me. (I like your perspective on the brown flecks!)

Kari Pike said...

oooh, Liz this sounds so yummy. I have lots of lemon juice in the freezer from our tree. I think i will make this for my Dad for his birthday...unless he insists on blueberry. hmmm...no wonder my clothes are getting so tight! hugs~

Laurie LC Lewis said...

Thanks, Liz! I'm always looking for something new, and lemon always hits the spot!

Tina Scott said...

Liz,
I was just thinking about lemon pie this morning. I've never tried a recipe like this one, it looks yummy!
Thanks for your kind words on my blog :)
Tina

Monique said...

that sounds sooooo good. I have a ton of lemon juice to use up. Guess I know what we're having for dessert on Easter. thanks.

KelliSue Kolz said...

As for me, I'm celebrating CONFERENCE! Which means we break out the sushi rolls, chips and salsa, fruit trays and raspberry fluff dip and have our own Superbowl/I mean Conference party and watch conference all day. While the 11 year old boys are at priesthood session with Papa and Grandpapa, the girls are watching Dora the Explorer and making sour cream lemon pie. Thanks for the idea. We'll enjoy it tomorrow!

KelliSue
www.kellikolz.blogspot.com

Rachelle Christensen said...

Wow! Thanks for sharing. We'll be seeing my parents soon and my dad loves pies. I might have to try it.

Cecily Markland said...

I was going to make some kind of lemon bars, but I'm going to try this instead. Did you ever try it with a graham cracker crust? Just curious.

Liz Adair said...

Graham cracker crust would be fine--in fact, it might even be a better taste combination than a regular crust. Go for it!

Janet said...

Thanks, Tudy for the Lemon Sour cream pie recipe! My lemons in the fruit basket are doomed to a higher cause! ME! Altho this recipe will not help me lose any weight before my 45th high school reunion in July- first things first!!!

Chas Hathaway said...

Yummm!!!!!

Looks REALLY good!

I had the same problem with the double-spacing on my blog. So I did some research. When you finish writing your entry, click on the little tab next to Compose that says, "Edit HTML"

then, everywhere you want a double space, write "
" without quotation marks. If that's not enough space, write the same thing again. Don't worry about it showing up in the post. It won't.

Then save it.

I'm using that trick here to get double spaces.


- Chas
http://music.willowrise.com

Chas Hathaway said...

oops. Apparently the comment deal thought I was doing html when I did the quotation marks. Just use this sign <
and then b and then r and then the > sign