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Indiana · Dessert

Indiana Sugar Cream Pie

  • Intermediate
  • 75 min
  • roughly 2 of 4 for cost
  • Vegetarian

rich · warm-spiced · sweet-edged · floral Leads with richness that coats and comforts, warm spice humming through the middle, leaving a faint perfume.

Ingredients

  • 1 blind-baked 23cm pie shell
  • 500ml cream
  • 150g brown sugar
  • 50g cornstarch
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 55g butter
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • Nutmeg and cinnamon to dust

The skills inside

Pie crust & blind baking

Allergen screen

Found: dairy

Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.

Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.

Method

  1. Whisk the brown sugar, cornstarch, and salt in a saucepan.
  2. Slowly whisk in the cream until smooth, then set over medium heat.
  3. Cook, whisking constantly, until it thickens and bubbles, 8-10 min. Off the heat beat in the butter and vanilla. 10 min
  4. Pour into the baked shell and dust the top with nutmeg and cinnamon.
  5. Bake at 220C for 10 min just to set the top, then cool and chill 3 hours. 10 min

How to tell it is going right

This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.

Pie crust & blind baking 29 recipes

  • The shell goes into the oven cold and the oven is fully up to heat, so the structure sets before the fat has time to melt out of it.
  • Lined and weighted right into the corners rather than heaped in the middle, so the sides are held against the tin as the fat softens.
  • Docked where it is not meant to puff, and the base stays flat rather than lifting into a dome under its own steam.
  • The weights come out and the base gets dry heat of its own before anything wet arrives. Pale and damp is not baked, and a filling will not finish it.
  • The edges are set and coloured and the shell releases from the tin rather than gripping it.

Where it goes wrong It went in warm, or the weights only filled the middle. The sides slump down the tin before the pastry sets, so the case is shallower than it should be, the filling overflows it, and the base is still raw underneath: the soggy bottom, arrived at three ways at once.

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The sweetness rule is absolute: the pour must be sweeter than the plate, and acid keeps it from cloying.

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Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Indiana Sugar Cream Pie Technique: Tempering a custardThe skill inside this recipeTechnique: Pie crust & blind bakingThe skill inside this recipe Search YouTube: J. Kenji López-Alt on Indiana Sugar Cream Pie A YouTube search for J. Kenji López-Alt and this dish. No affiliation.