Calamondin Pie

The little sour oranges are so beautiful.....the color in incredible, but the taste........

...is VERY sour! The boy of this family LOVES sour things ( he can eat those super sour gummies at lightning speed) and he had a hard time with these.

Funny thing is , the more of them you eat, the less sensitized you become to the sour and you can start to taste the orange/tangerine flavor. The girl wouldn't be still long enough for me to get a snap of her sour face.

To make the pie, I think I juiced about 20 of them to give just over a cup of juice. The best method was to just cut them in half and squeeze them over a mesh strainer , then mash with the back of a spoon to extract every drop. The peel is very loose and thin, but they are hard to peel because they are so small and the peel tears very easily.

So, for the pie I figured to make it just like I would a lemon icebox pie. Here is what you need:

1. 1 bag or box of vanilla wafers

2. 1 stick of butter, melted

3. 2 cans of sweetened condensed milk

4. 6 egg yolks

5. 1 cup of juice ( this time it was calamondin, but you could use lemon or lime)

Smash up the vanilla wafers and mix with the butter, then press into the bottom of your pie pan. This one happens to be a very deep dish, round one, but you could do it easily in a 9x13 glass pan. Refrigerate until filling is done. ( Save out enough vanilla wafers to stand up around the edgef of the pie if you like. ) This will likely make more crumb than you need.

Then beat the egg yolks until they are light and thickened. Add both cans of sweetened condensed milk and the juice. Mix well. I used my KitchenAid, but a hand mixer,or even a wire whisk would do fine.

Pour the filling into the prepared crust. You can stand a row of vanilla wafers around the edge if you like, but I didn't in this one because I forgot to save any out when I beat them all with the mallet for the crust. Bake for about 15 minutes at 325. It won't be completely set, but it will firm up in the refrigerator.

There it is right out of the oven. For garnish, you could put a handful of cookie crumbs on top if you didn't bang them all up like I did. If you saved the egg whites, you could whip up a little meringue and plop on top, but I don't like meringue, so it doesn't happen at my house. A glob of whipped cream or Cool Whip would do it just fine.

I'll have to let you know tomorrow how it turned out since I can't eat it and the people here aren't fair critics. I'll take it to work and see if it can pass muster there. If so, I'm juicing the rest of these buggers tomorrow night!