Key Lime Pie

I can’t believe I am sharing this with yall. I thought about keeping it a secret so everyone would be all “Kelley makes the best key lime pie ever.” But then I think about how I use the blog to remember recipes – and if I ever lost my paper copy, I would cry. So putting it on the internet is really the best option. Plus – this way maybe yall will make it – and give me a piece – and I won’t have to squeeze 30 key limes by hand. Wishful thinking on Dan’s part – he despises helping squeeze the limes.

We have had a couple key-lime-pie-offs where we compare this recipe with those of other restaurants / bakeries and this has always won. We haven’t compared it with every restaurant ever, so don’t go all crazy on me if you think your bakery is best. It could be. You hold the key-lime-pie-off. Invite us. It’ll be delicious.

Start with a homemade graham cracker crust. You can use the store bought one, but in one of our key-lime-pie-offs, I realized that the store bought crust was really taking this pie down a notch. Only recently did I start making it with a homemade crust and that really sends it over the edge.

I took 1 wrapped package of graham crackers (there's 3 per box) - food processed into crumbs, added 1/3 cup sugar and 3/4 of a stick of butter melted. Pressed into a pie dish and baked at 350 for about 10 minutes. Let the crust cool.

Zest a few key limes to get 2 tablespoons of zest. You’ll want to do this before you start squeezing.

Squeeze enough key limes to get 6 ounces of key lime juice. I usually buy one bag, squeeze the crap out of them to get every ounce, and then top the remaining few teaspoons with juice from a real lime. Otherwise, you buy two bags and are left with quite a few key limes. Or you could sloppily squeeze two bags, but that’s a lot more effort.

Don’t use real limes, don’t use concentrate juice, it’s not the same. People will fight you on this. They are very passionate about their key lime juice concentrate. Have a pie off. They’ll see.

Mix together:

6 ounces Key lime juice

2 cans of sweetened condensed milk

½ cup sour cream

2 T key lime zest

Pour into your prepared crust and bake at 350 until you see little bubbles on the top. This takes about 30 minutes for me. But my oven is ridiculous so don’t listen to me. Just check every 10 minutes. The timing is very forgiving.

Put the pie in the fridge for a few hours until completely cool. Then, I top it with an entire small container of cool whip. You can use homemade whipped cream (which I advocate 99% of the time, but for this, for some reason, cool whip tastes better). Don’t use canned whipped cream (like reddi-whip) or you’ll have a liquid mess after about 12 hours. And you’ll hate yourself and your carpel tunnel for squeezing all of the key limes.

If you are from some weird planet and are not a cool whip lover, and think the amount is excessive: the pie is pretty sour, so it definitely needs the whipped topping to add more sweet.

You’ll never buy one at a grocery store again.