My daughter saw a show on the food network where someone made a watermelon pie, and she has been trying to repeat it ever since, or at least come up with a good version of her own. I bought a huge watermelon this weekend so she could try again. She has tried this two times already and the watermelon doesn’t make a good filing. It is simply too watery. She has tried mixing it with cream cheese, and even that doesn’t quite work.
Tapioca, watermelon, and cream cheese
Crust made from potatoes and almonds and rice
Crust with filling
Meringue spooned on
So this time I suggested thickening it up with tapioca. Here is a picture of it cooking. We tried draining the watermelon, but when you pulp watermelon, you basically get watermelon juice, and not much more. There is nothing to thicken it up on its own, which is why I thought of tapioca. Perhaps corn starch next time?
Then came making the crust, and keeping with the glutton free theme, which I will mention tomorrow, I made the crust with potatoes, almonds and some mix of rice flour. As usual, nothing is ever written down, so who knows how much of each I put in. I found the basis for the recipe in the Broccoli Forest, again. Great book for experimenting with. One of these days I’ve actually got to follow the whole recipe and see what happens.
So, then we poured the tapioca watermelon mix into the pie crust, and decided to go all out and add meringue. I suppose we could have just stopped there, but the last time we made this, we cooked the crust, then cooked the meringue separately because we felt the filling didn’t need to be cooked. But since I had already boiled it down when adding the tapioca, I figured it couldn’t hurt to cook it some more.
Now, the last time we made meringue, it turned out soupy, so this time we added the ingredients before whipping the eggs. I had also read that one shouldn’t handle the egg whites, so we were very careful with that, doing it the way my mother showed me, which is to toss the yolk back and forth in the shell.
The finished pie
And the meringue came out for once. It cooked up nice an fluffy.
Unfortunetly, the pie was not quite what we wanted. The meringue was great, and now that we know how to make it right, we shall do that part again. We used six egg’s white, 3 table spoons of raw sugar and a dab of vanilla and almond, before we started beating it. This seemed to work better.
And the crust wasn’t bad either, and might work well for other things.
But all together, this pie is not one we will keep much beyond taking photos of it. Like the recipes that Edward Lear wrote, I feel we should throw the whole mess out the window to finish it off.
