Week 17: Banana Cream Pie

Banana Cream Pie

I’m going to start by saying I love banana flavored stuff. I have banana yogurt nearly every morning. I love banana pudding and banana Laffy Taffy! I hadn’t had circus peanuts in years and after a family discussion about them, we purchased some for the kids to try. Guess what, the reason I always liked them??? Yep, they’re banana flavored!

Yet, despite all that, I’ve never made nor eaten banana cream pie. My only explanation for this situation is that I also love pie and will always choose a fruit pie over a cream pie. If I’m at Village Inn, for instance, selecting a piece of pie, I’m going to choose strawberry rhubarb or cherry or even apple before one of their cream pies. That being said, this particular bake was actually on our list because Aubrey selected it. It’s a pie she had always wanted to try and, of course, make.

For this recipe, we went back to my favorite dessert cookbook Mom’s Best Desserts. Aubrey decided that all of our pie recipes should come from this book, along with the uniquely American desserts like shoofly pie. The crust for this pie was the second half of the pie crust we made for the shoofly pie. (see that post for the pie crust recipe)

As usual, we made a few substitutions. We substituted a mixture of Xylo-Sweet, Swerve, and Splenda for the sugar. No set proportion, just took our 2/3 measuring cup and poured some of the 3 sweeteners in until it was full. As I have stated before, mixing them counterbalances the negative aspects of each sweetener. We used almond milk instead of cow’s milk. Of course, we used our whole wheat pie crust that used no sugar as well.

Ingredients

• Pastry for 9″ single crust pie
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 3 T cornstarch
• 2 T all-purpose flour
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2 cups milk
• 4 large egg yolks
• 2 T butter, cut into small pieces
• 1 T dark rum
• 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
• 1 cup heavy whipping cream
• 3 large bananas, sliced

Instructions

1. Prepare the pie shell according to the recipe instructions. Fully bake the shell and let it cool on a rack before filling. (For baked pie shell: Preheat oven to 425 degrees with a rack in the lower third of the oven. Roll dough and place in pie pan. Prick the bottom and sides of the dough with a fork at 1/2″ intervals. Fit a large piece of foil into the bottom and up the sides of the pie dough. Fill it with dried beans or baker’s pellets to provide weight and prevent crust from buckling. Bake in lower third of the oven for 10 minutes, then remove foil and beans. Prick the bottom of the crust with the fork again to keep it from puffing up. Return the pie shell to the oven for 10 to 12 minutes, or until it is golden. Cool on rack before filling.)
2. In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, make a custard by combining sugar, cornstarch, flour, and salt. Add the milk gradually, stirring constantly with a wire whisk to remove any lumps. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens and comes to a boil. Continue stirring and boil for 1 minute. Remove from the heat.
3. Gradually add 1/2 cup of the custard to the beaten egg yolks, a few teaspoons at a time, mixing constantly until blended. Pour the yolk mixture back into the custard pan, stirring until combined. Cook the custard, stirring constantly, for 2 minutes, until thick and smooth. Remove the pan from the heat.
4. Add the butter gradually to the custard. Stir in the rum and vanilla. Pour the custard into a bowl. Cover the surface with plastic wrap. Cool completely.
5. Whip the cream until stiff. Fold half the whipped cream into the custard filling.
6. Spoon a tin layer of custard over the bottom of the baked pie shell. Arrange a layer of sliced banana over the filling. Alternate layers of custard and bananas, ending with custard. Pipe the remaining whipped cream on top of the pie.
7. Refrigerate the pie for 3 to 4 hours, until firm.

Our Experience

The pie crust needed to be cooked empty, or blind baked, and cooled before we could assemble the the pie so we got the crust ready early. Luckily, we still had the second half of our pie crust from the shoofly pie in the freezer. It just took a little time to thaw. We rolled it out to about 1/8″ thick and then wrapped the dough around the rolling pin to transfer to the pie plate.

I usually use a knife to trim off the edges but today, I thought I might try my kitchen shears to trim the dough. It worked so much better than the knife, I think I have a new method. I thought we might try to trim the dough like we did with the bakewell tart, but that didn’t work so well. In the end, the experiment made for a not so pretty crust. Lesson learned.

I left some crust hanging over the edge because I wanted to try to trim it off after cooking it. The holes help to allow the steam in the crust to escape rather than puff up and create bubbles full of air.

Once the crust was pressed into the plate and the holes pricked in it, it was time to put the weights in the plate. I keep some beans in a zip lock bag for this very purpose. The crust was lined with aluminum foil and the beans were put inside. It was ready to put into the oven.

Halfway through the second 10 minutes of baking I realized I hadn’t put my pie crust protector on the edges. I quickly put it on, but the “damage” was done. Oh, well, it was going to taste good even if it didn’t look so great. When using whole wheat, it is really difficult to judge the doneness because the telltale golden brown you get with all-purpose flour doesn’t exist. We still haven’t gotten used to the darker color of whole wheat flour, but we’re getting better.

When making custard, there’s a lot of stirring required. The sweeteners, cornstarch, flour, salt, and milk were added to the sauce pan and we cooked it until it thickened up and boiled. It seemed like it took forever but we are always going to err on the side of caution when it comes to cooking a custard because it just wouldn’t taste good if we scalded it.

We needed to temper the yolks before adding them to the rest of the custard. We slowly added about 1/2 a cup of the hot custard to the yolks before adding all of that mixture to the rest of the hot custard.

I mentioned this when we made pastry cream for our napoleons, but it bears repeating (even for Aubrey). She covered the container with the plastic wrap instead of the custard itself. For things like custard or a pastry cream, always push the plastic wrap onto the custard. It will prevent a film from forming on the top of the custard…the film is unusable and, unless you like eating it (George Costanza), you don’t want it on your dessert.

As far as the whipped cream goes, the only thing I wanted to point out was that it didn’t have any sweetener. I don’t think it needed it, but, for those of you who like a sweeter dessert, adding a bit to the cream would have been an obvious choice. The cream was whipped and then folded into the custard.

Once the filling was ready to go it was just a layering process. A thin layer of custard was added to the bottom of the crust, then a layer of bananas, another layer of custard, another layer of bananas, and, for us, finished with a layer of custard. If we thought the pie would be eaten in one sitting, we would have added the whipped cream as directed. Since we were only sure of 3 pieces being eaten right away, we decided to add the whipped cream to each individual pie…out of a can no less. 🙂

What we liked.

This pie received a 4 out of 4 since Logan wasn’t in on the taste testing! She is not a fan of banana flavored things (what the heck!?). Even without real milk, the custard was creamy. I was surprised that the banana flavor was so strong even though there was no banana flavoring…just real bananas. While it chilled, the bananas imparted their flavor to the vanilla flavored custard and I would have sworn it was banana flavored custard!

Since we didn’t add the layer of whipped cream (due to not eating it in one sitting), we added the canned whipped cream to our own liking which was nice since some tasters don’t care for whipped cream.

The pie crust was flaky and crisp, just as it should be and, despite the look of it, was not burned. Having a crisp crust is necessary for an additional texture in an otherwise all soft textured dessert. Having said that….

What we would change.

While I love my homemade pie crust, I think this pie might be better with a different crust. It was difficult to cut through without destroying the delicate custard above it. A cookie crust might have been better. Possibly vanilla wafers? Those seem to be the cookie of choice when it comes to banana desserts.

The custard wasn’t as set as I would have expected. (Granted, we did our first cuts before it was fully chilled. What? We were hungry!!) That might have been due to our substitution of almond milk. I’m not willing to add that many calories to the pie, so, I think we might increase the thickening agent to compensate.

I think I am the only one who thought it was sweeter than it needed to be, so if I were making it only for myself, I might ease up on the sweetener a bit.

Finally, since bananas vary in size, I would suggest having 4 on hand just in case you need more. We had to stretch the bananas just to get our second layer in the pie and then had none for a garnish, which we had wanted to include in our final presentation.

I would consider making the pie again with those changes, but, if I have the choice to make this pie or strawberry rhubarb…I’m still making (and eating) the fruit pie!!

What we learned.

We have executed every method we used in making this pie so there weren’t any new techniques to learn. We continue to learn how our substitutions affect the final product. The mix of sweeteners worked really well and we will remember to do the same in the future.

Until next week, Happy Baking!

As a post script, I’m going to post our family tradition of “pie crust cookies”. There are always scraps of pie crust left over after making a pie. My mom didn’t bake a lot, but she did make pie! This is something I learned from her and have passed on to my kids. I will admit that, as a kid, the pie crust cookies were my favorite part of Mom’s pie making. I didn’t care much about pie at the time. These days, the pie is my favorite but the “cookies” bring me back to my mom’s kitchen and the many times my siblings and I devoured these treats.