CREAM PIES

CREAM PIE HAS ALMOST UNIVERSAL APPEAL, with enough flavoring options—vanilla, chocolate, banana, coconut, and butterscotch—to satisfy almost everyone. The key is to create a filling that is soft and creamy yet stiff enough to cut cleanly. It's not as easy as it sounds.

In our tests, the use of flour left us with a filling that was too soft. Gelatin made for a rubbery filling, and tapioca, which works well in fruit pies, produced a filling with the texture of stewed okra. Only cornstarch coupled with egg yolks (whole eggs yielded a grainy texture) gave us the proper results.

The dairy component is also vital. Cream is simply too rich for a pie that already contains butter and eggs. Skim milk tasted thin and lacked the creamy texture we wanted. Both 2 percent and whole milk worked well but were even better when combined with a bit of evaporated milk, which adds a rich, round, caramel flavor. The basic vanilla cream filling also benefits greatly from the use of a vanilla bean in place of extract.

When making a cream filling for a pie, some cooks heat the sugar, cornstarch, and milk to a simmer, gradually add some of this mixture to the yolks to stabilize them, and then return the stabilized yolks to the rest of the simmering milk. We found this process, called tempering the eggs, to be unnecessary in this recipe. You can dump everything except the flavorings and butter into a saucepan and cook, stirring often, until the mixture begins to bubble. This method is simpler, and because the cornstarch prevents the eggs from curdling, it isn't that risky.

Developing a filling with great body as well as flavor is important, as is preventing that filling from turning the prebaked crust soggy. Unlike most pies, this one does not call for the filling to be baked in the crust. The moist, fluid filling is simply scraped into the crust and chilled. We found two procedures that help to keep the crust crisp.

Coating the dough with graham cracker crumbs as it is rolled out produces an especially crisp, browned pie shell. It also helps to pour the filling into the crust while the filling is warm but not quite hot. Hot filling keeps the crust crisp, but, because it is still quite liquid when poured into the crust, it settles compactly and falls apart when sliced. Warm filling, having had a chance to set a bit, mounds when poured into the crust and slices beautifully. Like hot filling, however, warm filling will not make the crust soggy.

Whatever you do, don't wait until the filling has cooled to scrape it into the pie shell. When we tried it, cooled filling turned soupy and moistened our once-crisp crust. You can't disturb the filling once the starch bonds have completely set. If you break the starch bonds, you destroy the filling's structure. Those who have tried stirring liqueur into a chilled pastry cream may have been confronted with similar results. When we stirred the cold filling to put it into the crust, we broke the starch bonds so that the filling went from stiff to runny. We learned a major lesson. You can cool the filling to warm, but once it has set, don't stir it.