My first banana cream pie ever

Posted on by Lani and Norm
banana cream pie
Estimated read time 6 min read

I have always made apple pies or pumpkin pies or meat pies, the sort of pie where you have to bake it.  But I have always wanted to make a pie where rather than baking the pie and it’s filling, you chill the pie with it’s filling before serving.  So, a cold pie.  A lot of the cream pies are like this including banana cream pie. 

Blind Baking a Pie Crust

I went through a period earlier this year, where I tried making different types of cream or custard type pies.  When I started reading through different pie recipes, I realized that the pie crust has to be cooked. But I never precooked a pie crust before and I have never used a store bought pie crust!  I wasn’t going to start now!  This is when I came across blind baking a crust.  What is this?  This is when you bake the pie crust on its own before making the actual pie.  However, when baking pastry in the oven, it has a tendency to puff up and also to shrink.  Seems contradictory but the fat in the pie crust dough melts causing the crust to shrink when it’s baking and the steam causing the pie crust to puff up. 

You don’t want a puffy, shrunken pie crust so what do you do?  I have come across a few ways to avoid the puffiness:  put weight in the pie crust to prevent it from puffing up.  There are special pie weights that can be purchased specifically for this purpose.  I have also heard of putting rice or dried beans, like white, black or chick peas in the crust you’re baking.  First line the crust you’re baking with parchment paper or put another pie plate in the crust itself and put the rice or beans in that inner pie plate.  Another technique I read about was baking the crust upside down. What you do is put a second empty pie plate in the crust to be baked but instead of putting it in the oven the usual way, put it in upside down.  I find this latter method works great.   Now, part way through the baking, remove the pie weights and bake the pie crust as is so that the bottom inside of the pie crust had a chance to get cooked.  You don’t want raw pie crust. 

Ways to prevent puffing when blind baking pie crust

  1. Put weights in the crust when baking.  Specific pie weight can be purchased.  Or put another empty pie plate in the crust to be baked and then put rice, dried beans, lentils, or chickpeas in the empty pie plate to weigh down the inner pie plate and put pressure on the crust while baking.
  2. Bake the crust upside down.

Ways to prevent shrinkage when blind baking pie crust

How do you prevent shrinkage of the crust when you blind bake?  No one wants shrinkage!  One suggestion I have read about is to chill or freeze the crust before baking.  Another suggestion, which makes sense, put more dough.  So that is, make a slightly thicker crust especially along the sides of the pie plate; make the crust flow over the edge of the pie plate a bit.  This way during baking it will shrink but hopefully the crust will shrink to the size of the pie plate because you have included more pie crust dough. [2,3,4]

  1. Chill or freeze the pie crust before baking.
  2. Make a slightly thicker and larger pie crust, flowing over the edge of the pie plate. 

Ingredients:

Filling

  • 1 9″ pie crust, baked and cooled
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1/4 cup cornstarch
  • 1/8 tsp salt
  • 2 egg yolks
  • 2 cups milk
  • 2 Tbsp butter
  • 1 1/2 tsp vanilla
  • 3 bananas

Topping

  • 1 cup heavy cream
  • 3 Tbsp powdered sugar
  • 1/4 tsp vanilla

Directions:

  1. Make the pie crust dough according to the directions and bake in the oven.
  2. Stir the sugar, cornstarch and salt together in a pan. 
  3. Whisk the egg yolks together until smooth.
  4. Whisk in the milk with the egg yolks.
  5. Slowly stir the milk mixture into the pan with the sugar, cornstarch and salt.
  6. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until the mixture thickens and boils.
  7. Boil and stir for 1-2 more minutes.
  8. Remove from heat and then stir in the butter and vanilla.
  9. Place the pan in an ice water bath to cool the pudding. (So in a larger bowl with iced water.)
  10. Stir to prevent a skin from forming the pudding.
  11. Slice the bananas and put in the baked pie shell.
  12. Pour the lukewarm pudding over the bananas and chill for at least 2 hours.  (Over night is best.)
  13. Whip the cream and spread on top the chilled pie.
  14. Serve immediately or put back in the fridge.

Recipe notes:

To remove any lumps from the pudding you can pour the warm pudding through a strainer to remove any lumps.  But this isn’t necessary.

Modifications for future versions:

I thought this recipe would have more banana in the actual filling rather than just a layer of banana at the bottom of the pie crust.  I think if I were to do this recipe again, I might mash the bananas up, and then I would mix the mashed bananas into the custard filling then pour into the crust and chill.  I another thing I might do is look up a banana custard recipe, if there is anything like that, make that then add that into the pie crust. 

Tea pairings:

This is interesting, pairing banana with tea.  I didn’t think banana could be paired with tea.  But, I was reading about pairing teas with fruit and it seems the less fruity or strongly flavoured the food or fruit the more appropriate it would be to pair with a lighter tea such as a white tea.  [5] Bananas have a gentle flavour as does custard, so perhaps a white or green tea would work with this banana cream pie.

Note:

I’m no cook, chef or baker so everything I make is based on the enjoyment of creating something new, cooking, baking and especially tea!  I hope you enjoy the recipes, both making them and the tasting the results!

References:

  1. Banana Cream Pie, Kara Cook, Nov 2012, Creations by Kara, URL: https://www.creationsbykara.com/banana-cream-pie
  2. How to blind bake a pie crust, Elise Bauer, July 2018, Simply Recipes, URL: https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/how_to_blind_bake_a_pie_crust/
  3. How to blind bake a Pie Crust, Sally, March 2018, Sally’s Baking Addiction, URL: https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/how-to-blind-bake-pie-crust/
  4. How to blink bake pie crust: Pre-baking yields perfect results, P J Hamel, Nov 2015, King Arthur Flour, URL: https://blog.kingarthurflour.com/2015/11/23/blind-bake-pie-crust/
  5. Beginners guide to pairing tea with food, Andreea Macoveiciuc, Jan 2014, River Tea, URL: http://www.rivertea.com/blog/beginners-guide-pairing-tea-food/
Lani and Norm
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Lani and Norm

I enjoy learning and sharing that knowledge. Sharing has been in many forms over the years, as a teaching assistant, university lecturer, Pilates instructor, math tutor and just sharing with friends and family. Throughout, summarizing what I have learnt in words has always been there and continues to through blog posts, articles, video and the ever growing forms of content out there!

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