Key Lime Pie

Key lime pie

Cut-away view of a traditional key lime pie.

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A slice of key lime pie.

Key lime pie is a dessert made of key lime juice, egg yolks, and sweetened condensed milk in a crushed cookie crust, or blind baked pie crust. In keeping with its history as an unbaked pie, it is traditionally served with no topping, or purely decorative topping, as in [1] or [2] for example. There is are also sources which state that a Key Lime Pie should have a meringue topping, for example [3], [4] and [5].

The dish is named after the small key limes (Citrus aurantifolia 'Swingle') that are naturalized throughout the Florida Keys. Their thorns make them less tractable, their thin yellow rind makes them more perishable, but they are more tart and aromatic than the common Persian limes seen year round in most U.S. grocery stores. Key lime juice, unlike regular lime juice, is a pale yellow. The filling in key lime pie is also yellow, largely due to the egg yolks.

Key lime pie is made with canned sweetened condensed milk, since fresh milk was not a common commodity in the Florida Keys before modern refrigerated distribution methods. During mixing, a reaction between the condensed milk and the acidic lime juice occurs which causes the filling to thicken on its own without requiring baking. Many early recipes for key lime pie did not instruct the cook to ever bake the pie, relying on this chemical reaction to produce the proper consistency of the filling. Today, in the interest of safety due to consumption of raw eggs, pies of this nature are usually baked for a short time. The baking also thickens the texture even more than the reaction alone.

As of July 1, 2006, Key Lime Pie is the Florida state pie.