This Key Lime Pie Will Get You a Boyfriend | Vaughn Vreeland | NYT Cooking

Get the recipe for Vaughn’s Key Lime Pie FREE: https://nyti.ms/40HskfA

Vaughn is here to show us how to make his recipe for this classic American pie, and it’s a choose-your-own-adventure situation: You can just use fresh fruit, go for the bottled stuff as a shortcut or use a blend of Persian lime juice with lemon juice for a solid substitution. And because every dessert needs some salt, there’s also a good amount of salt in the crust that offsets the tart curd and rich whipped cream topping.

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“This pie is also very
special to me, guys, because I met my boyfriend
two years ago and I made it for him on our second date. The rest was herstory.” [MUSIC PLAYING] “Hello, everybody. I’m Vaughn. I’m here at the NYT
Cooking Studio Kitchen, and today we’re
making key lime pie. I don’t have enough good
things to say about key lime pie. I think it’s one of
my favorite desserts. It reminds me of the beach. That nice salty bite
in the graham cracker crust offsets that tart bite. Mmm! This is your summer
loving key lime pie. Let’s make it.” [SQUEAKING] “(SQUEAKY VOICE) Let’s make
a crust. (REGULAR VOICE) No, I need to work on
my Mickey voice. I truly went in my closet. I was like what’s the most
Florida man shirt I can find. Obviously graham cracker
crust very traditional. I was down at my aunt’s
place, which is in Anna Maria, Florida, not the Keys. Every restaurant we went to
we would get the key lime pie, and we would kind
of rate it and talk about what we liked
about it, what was different from the other
restaurants we had it at. And I think that for
me, the crust really was that make or break. The key lime pie filling
is pretty standard. The crust is really
the thing that, like, is obviously the foundation
of what you’re working on. I have it mostly pulsed. Anything that’s big like
this, if it kind of comes to the surface, you can just
crush it with your hands. And now I’m going
to melt my butter, and then we’ll be rocking
and rolling with our crust. Oh, nice seeing you here. Be very careful
of it splattering. So I cover it with a
butter wrapper actually. I’ll probably check it after
20 seconds just to make sure.” [BEEPING] “Just take it out when the
pats of butter are, like, floating to the surface,
struggling for their lives, take a fork and whisk it
until the residual heat melts the rest of the butter. This is kosher salt. If
you’re working with, like, a table salt, I would
definitely check salinity levels and probably half it. The brown sugar also adds a
little bit of that deeper, richer molasses flavor. I like to use my hands because
if there are any bigger pieces of graham cracker
crumb, you can kind of just go through and do
that with your hands. But also I’m not totally
worried about pieces like that because, you know, it
doesn’t have to be, like, so super uniform. I’m going to go in
with the butter. You want to mix it until
the crumbs are really well saturated. It’s also nice to
use your hands here. It’s like your shampooing. It’s like ahhh. When I go like this, it’s
almost like wet sand. It should leave
an indentation, but it shouldn’t
be super compact. We don’t want it
to be like a brick. If you had more
moisture in here, then it kind of leads
to a soggy crust as it sits in
the refrigerator. O.K., so now I’m just
gonna spread this in here. And like I said, I a
little bit of a heftier crust, so this is going to
look at first pretty full. Get a flush surface
all the way across. I take a bigger measuring
cup and start in the center and press down. And that’s how I kind of
work the crust to the edge. I like to make sure that there
is a pretty even amount all the way around. I take the 90 degree
edge, and then I take my forefinger
of my left hand. You are kind of,
like, pressing them into each other like that. You may be like oh, this
looks, like, crumbley, but you’re going to bake it. So it’s gonna solidify
a little bit more, and some of that moisture
is going to draw out of it. And occasionally since I’m
really pressing in this way, some of the bottom
has indentations. So I’ll just take this and
make sure that that stays flush. That’s kind of the
thickness I’m looking for. I woke up this morning
feeling a little crummy, but then I said, hey, I’m
gonna have key lime pie.” [MUSIC PLAYING] “I’m just gonna go back
through now that I have my foundation laid. Then I kind of take my
measuring cup and very slowly go around the sides just to
see if I have any weak spots just, like, if
there’s any give. So because as I
was pressing it, it kind of created this
little, like, volcano, you can take a fork
or a spoon or whatever and just kind of push those
crumbs back in, pat that down. The rest of these crumbs
can just be pressed back in. It’s pretty
meditative honestly. I’m gonna bake this
for about 15 minutes. Color’s gonna
deepen a little bit, so we do want to get a pretty
good break on it because we want it to stay together
while you’re slicing it.” [MUSIC PLAYING] “What’s that I smell? My crust. Ooh, she’s looking nice. So you can see definitely
took on a more golden, deeper color. Almost ambery. It smells really good. I’m gonna let that
cool completely to room temperature. So I’ve got key limes here,
really tart, very puckery, much more so than your
normal lime juice. Ooh. I am gonna zest
these little things. I need a tablespoon, so that’s
going to be about 78 limes. Gonna be here
zesting all day.” [MUSIC PLAYING] “Three hours later. O.K., wow. I’ve got a tablespoon
and then some. One thing that’s really important
when you’re mixing this curd is you do not want
to mix it much more than, like, five minutes in
advance before pouring it in the crust, your curd can
actually start to curdle, and I know that that sounds
a little like antithetical. It’ll get chunky and gross. Just do this while your
crust is, like, almost cold, which mine is because zesting
these limes took 7,000 years. I like to get my eggs and
my sweetened condensed milk started first to make sure
that all of those yolks are really evenly incorporated in
there because it’s gonna help us with that nice,
smooth, even curd. Gorge. Even though the acidity
is a really strong flavor, we still want that salt
content to kind of balance it a little bit, and I’m going
to add my hard-earned key lime zest. Add your key lime
juice in there. O.K., zero waste king, go off. I’m going to start stirring
this in the center and then work my way out. And you will actually see that
this mixture starts to thicken as you’re stirring it. Oh, absolutely gorgeous.” [MUSIC PLAYING] “So you can see how
jiggly it is now. I’m just giving it a little
wobble to even out the top. I’m gonna bake it for about
15-ish minutes until the edges are set, but we still
want there to be a wobble because if you bake it
‘til it’s completely set, then you’re going to end up
with, again, a curdled curd. All right, so I was looking
for a slight wobble. The edges are set. And not really moving, but
when I kind of just very gently move her
back and forth, it’s a tighter jiggle
than a jello jiggle. You can tell that this is
gonna continue to set up even more, but it’s not
going to be over-baked. I’m going to let this
cool completely to room temperature, and then
I’m going to stick it in the refrigerator for
at least three hours. If you’re gonna be
chilling it overnight, I would definitely cover
it with some plastic wrap.” [MUSIC PLAYING] “It’s got such a
nice yellow color. It’s shiny. I can see my reflection
in this thing. It is going to
slice really nicely. There is no wobble left. O.K., so I’m going to set this
aside while I make the whipped cream. This is just a very
standard whipped cream. A — a nice whipped cream with
mascarpone or creme fraiche would be really good
in this, but, again, I wanted this to
be a very classic. Salting your dairy is
for me at least usually a cardinal rule, especially
for a whipped cream. It just helps it make it
taste more like itself. I’m gonna start it out
of it and then go in. Now you want to make sure
that your heavy cream is really, really cold. And you can see that
my powdered sugar had a little bit of clumps in
it, but they will dissolve. Starting to
thicken it up here. Ooh!” [MUSIC PLAYING] “Slices like a dream. Like, seeing this
cross-section making me feel things, a testament to
the sturdiness of the crust. And its not soggy, which
is paramount for me. Mmm! That is so good. The graham cracker crust is
hefty without being dense. It’s very tart but in a way
that’s, like, palatable. My little salivary
glands are going zing. But then the cream
is calming them down. It’s like a bath. Very therapeutic. If you want to find
this key lime pie recipe and bring a little
bit of Florida to you, go to NYTCooking.com and
click the link below. If you want someone to
fall in love with you, make them this key lime pie.”