- Hey bakers, John Kanell
here from Preppy Kitchen here. Today we're making a perfectly sweet, super zingy lemon meringue
pie with a homemade butter pastry crust that
you are just gonna die for. It comes together in a snap and let's get started. I'm zesting two lemons into a large bowl. Use nice, fresh lemons,
organic if you can find them. Otherwise give them a really good wash. The zest has so much flavor and aroma that really is a great
addition to any lemon dish. One. And two. All right, roll those lemons out a bit, oh, slippery. Roll (chuckles) them out,
help kinda break them apart and that'll release
their juices more easily. Now we can give them a good cut. And strain your juice. We wanna have have 3/4 of a cup of fresh lemon juice. Fresh, people, not that
pre-made stuff, fresh. These are actually from my mom's tree. She brought over a care package. On her last visit. This will be an extra special dessert. I just juiced five smaller lemons, let's see how much I have. I want 3/4 of a cup of lemon juice and the zest is already in there. It's exactly 3/4 of a cup, how nice. Okay, next step. Into a good-sized heavy saucepan, I'm adding in 1 1/3 cups
of sugar, that's 266 grams. There we go. Didn't fall. 3/4 of a cup of my lemon juice and zest. 1 1/4 cups of water. A generous 1/4 teaspoon of kosher salt and I'm gonna zero this
out and tell you exactly how much corn starch
I'm adding in grams so, one, two, three, four tablespoons or 1/4 cup of
corn starch, that's 50 grams. This is our thickening
agent, it's important for getting a pie that
you can actually cut into. If you add too much, little gelatinous, you add too little, totally gloopy. You choose. We're gonna whisk this up now. That corn starch will form clumps so really just try and
break them up first. Okay, that's great. I'm gonna set this aside for just a minute while we separate our eggs. Yesterday, I had the worst luck and broke four egg yolks in a row. And I need to have my egg
whites for the meringue topping. So I'll be cracking each egg
individually into a test bowl like I should be doing all the time. The yolk is going one, dump that out and repeat the process. This is the best way to do things. I really rarely do this but yesterday was so crazy. I learned my lesson. Second yolk broke. What the heck? (beep) Not going so great. This one's better. In you go. So I have four egg yolks
and two egg whites. All right. I'm reserving these three
egg whites for later. I need some more of those so,
it didn't work out as planned. Whisk your yolks up. We're gonna set them aside. Now for our lemon mixture and some heat. Place lemon mixture on medium-high heat and just keep stirring it. You're gonna watch it, keep it moving and you'll notice when it's thickening up. It'll take a few minutes
but it's worth the wait. Okay, so right now, you can
see that it's starting to thicken up on the bottom. It happens really quickly. So just stir, stir, stir. And stir a bit harder too. Like, stir, stir, stir, stir, stir and then you can see, oh what's going on here? It looks totally different now, right? Just means that we're now
ready to turn the heat off. I'm gonna place a wet
towel underneath my yolks, the viewer hint I got and just pour in maybe like 1/3 or so of
this while you whisk hard. This is tempering the egg yolks. Okay and now, we can add
the hot egg yolk mixture into our lemon mixture. Get it all in there. So turn it back onto medium heat now. And we're gonna whisk it for two minutes. This is a great consistency. It will really setup nicely. But if you wanted to be runnier, just reduce the corn starch
by a tablespoon and 1/2 or 20 grams or so. So now I'm gonna add in four tablespoons of unsalted butter and
we're gonna stir that in. It's gonna change the
consistency completely, make it so silky and just amazing. Of course butter makes everything better. See how silky that is
now compared to before? Perfect. Let it cool down for just a minute and then we can pore
it into our pie shell. You're gonna be pouring
that delicious filling into the pie crust of your choice, I suggest a beautiful
homemade butter crust. You can click up here for
my perfect pie crust recipe. It has all my tips and tricks on how to get it right every single time but lemme take you through it real quick. Add 2 1/2 cups or 300 grams
of all purpose flour into a food processor along with
1/2 a teaspoon of salt, 1/4 cup of sugar and give it a nice whiz. Whiz, whiz, whiz, whiz, whiz. Then add in one full cup or
226 grams of cold cubed butter. Pulsing the food processor
a couple of times until you have like a
small grainy mixture. Grains the size of lentils. Drizzle in a 1/4 cup of ice water, mixed with some vodka. Your choice of how much. Just kidding. Add a tablespoon of vodka
to that ice water (chuckles) Drizzle that in while you
pulse the food processor. Dumb it out onto a surface of your choice. Mush it up together. Wrap it in plastic. And then, once it's chilled,
you're gonna roll it out, plop that into your pie
tin, whatever you're using. Get the edges all nice and pretty.. Add some parchment paper,
some tinfoil to support the edges, fill it with pie weight or beans, whatever you want. Bake at 425 for about 15 minutes. Remove it from the oven. Remove all of that tinfoil,
the beans, the paper. Give it an egg wash, tent the outside, bake it again for
another 15 minutes at 425 and then reduce the temperature to 375 and bake until it is golden brown. Pie filling cooled down just a little bit. So let's add that in there. This smells so good. It smells so good (chuckles) Now, just smooth it out
a bit and this is a very deep dish pie crust. I have a swap-out where
it's kinda normal size and it fills it all the way to the top. But this gives you some
room for the meringue too so it's not all gonna be hanging out. Okay, that looks fine considering it's gonna be completely covered. This guy should go into the fridge and honestly, if I were
you, I would do this the night before so I
would've baked it up the night before and then the day of, top it with the meringue, toast it and serve it. You could also top it with
the meringue right now. It will be okay but it's safer to do it this way because the meringue
might weep a little bit. And just become kinda slippery and slidy when you cut the pieces and you want them to be nice and stable, that's the whole point
of using that corn starch and doing all these steps. Cover this in plastic and
pop it into the fridge for at least three to four hours. At least four to five hours. Or over night (chuckles) I'm gonna come back with
one I made yesterday. Okay, so yesterday I made this pie. You can see, it's kind of the more typical pie tin sized container and it fills it all the
way right to the top. This is nice and good to go. I'm gonna make some quick
Italian meringue to top this. You can make a French
meringue if you prefer but Italian meringue
is gonna give you such a silky wonderful consistency,
you're gonna love it. For the Italian meringue, I'm adding in one cup or 200 grams of sugar. 1/3 of a cup of water. Set that aside for a minute. And I'm gonna use 160 grams or like four, kind of extra large egg whites. All right, I'm adding my
egg whites into a very very clean bowl. You can wipe that down
with vinegar if you want. Pinch of salt. 1/4 teaspoon of cream of tartar. It's a little acid to help
stabilize the egg whites. And we're gonna get this
going at the same time and we're gonna place this
sugar on a medium high heat. This needs to come to 240
before we can pour it in so hopefully, the egg
white will reach the soft peak stage right when your sugar is 240. If not, you know, adjust things. Start low and then move high. You wanna break the egg whites up slowly. (cheerful music) Once your egg white starts frothing up, we're gonna add in 1/3 of a cup of sugar really slowly while we're mixing. Drizzle that sugar in. Don't rush. Okay, now we can check
on our sugar temperature So I just checked this out, that hit 240 . This is the soft peak stage. You can see that it formed softer peaks that kinda have a little
bit of a drib to them. Very pretty. Aaah. So all we have to do is add in our sugar very hot, very carefully, while this mixes up. (cheerful music) Let's give that meringue
a little bit of flavor by adding in a splash of vanilla. (cheerful music) This needs to mix up for a little bit. Kinda warm so we want this to
be close to room temperature when we plop it onto that
nice cooled lemon curd. It'll be so amazing Use a spatula to transfer a
giant mound of that meringue onto your cooled pie. Go ahead massage it a bit. Create some little spikes,
little swoops here and there. Some nice visual interest. Now it's time to torch it. This gives a beautiful definition and a wonderful depth of
flavor to that meringue. I love it so much. If you don't have a kitchen torch, you need to treat yourself
and buy one right now. If you don't like meringue, by the way, you could totally just top
this with whipped cream, leave it plain, little
dusting of powdered sugar, even some strawberry slices. All of those would be delicious. I, however, love meringue, so
I'm excited to take a bite. Mmm-hmm, yum. So much lemon flavor but
not too much, just right. Hmmm and that meringue, it's really light and balances everything out and for me, the best finishing touch is the crunch of that pastry. It is so crispy, crunchy perfect. If you enjoyed this recipe, check out my lemon cake, it is full of zing, so creamy and it is a great
lemon lover's party treat. Thanks so much for watching. If you like my videos,
hit that like button and subscribe and I'll see you soon.
