Lemon Meringue Pie

[Mike Nolan]

Sounds like your meringue is weeping. That's caused by an unstable meringue, which can be cured by baking it longer or by making a different meringue type, one that produces a more stable meringue. Adding cornstarch is supposed to help stabilize a simple French meringue, but I think it affects the taste.

Here's a guide to the various types of meringue: French, Italian and Swiss Meringues

[skeptic7]

Fine cooking is a tease! It said there are problems with lemon meringue pie if it is undercooked, over cooked, starchy, but doesn't really explain about these problems and how to avoid them. Is a pie filling cooked when its thick? How do you tell when its overcooked?
undercooked? Is there a difference between flour and cornstarch?

How to Make Lemon Meringue Pie

[Mike Nolan]

There are sites that post partial answers (at best) to questions to try to get you to sign up for their site, especially the ones with a fee. I understand why they do it, but it still is irritating.

If you over-cook a French meringue, it gets rubbery. If you REALLY overcook a French meringue, it gets solid, like meringue cookies. I suspect that does bad things to the pie.

I don't personally like adding cornstarch to French meringue, because I think it affected the taste, but maybe I added too much. Never tried wheat flour, don't know if it would even work. I suspect the meringue pies you see at the grocery store or at a bakery have some kind of starch added to stabilize them.

I've made Swiss meringue for a pie once, it's a lot more work than French meringue, but it has the advantage of being very stable and easy to pipe if you're doing multiple pies. And you don't have to bake them much because the meringue is already cooked. (You usually put the meringue on after the pie is baked.) I've seen them torched to add color highlights.

Italian meringue (the one where you dribble hot sugar syrup into the whipped egg whites), is generally not recommended for pies. I've never seen an explanation why, maybe I'll do some digging on this one.

[skeptic7]

One thing about that video, I've come to realize that I need to cook my pie crusts a lot more! I stop when they are lightly brown, but the video shows the pie another shade darker.
I was wondering about the lemon filling as far as cornstarch vs flour. I've seen comparisons with different thickeners for fruit pie fillings, not so much for pudding type fillings. Judging from the video, the pie filling needs to be cooked until thick several times but I can't see why over mixing is a problem.

[Mike Nolan]

With a pudding pie filling (lemon, chocolate, vanilla, etc), you basically have two choices for a thickener, some kind of starch or egg yolks. I usually go with the latter, it's richer.

Not sure about over-mixing, but over-cooking a starch-thickened pie filling can cause the starch to break down.

McGee (On Food and Cooking) has a lot to say about thickeners; that book is my go-to source for cooking science. I've got some graduate level textbooks on food chemistry, but McGee tends to say the same thing in somewhat simpler language.

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