Peach Pie * how to separate eggs * how to whip egg whites * folding in ingredients

Peach Pie

3 egg whites

¾ c. sugar

14 saltine crackers, finely crushed

1 tsp vanilla extract

¼ tsp baking powder

½ c. chopped pecans

4-6 fresh peaches, peeled, pitted, and sliced

cinnamon

sweetened whipped cream

Preheat oven to 325 Fahrenheit. Lightly grease a 9” pie plate.

Whip egg whites until they can hold a peak. Add sugar and vanilla while continue to whip egg whites to stiff peaks. Fold in cracker crumbs, baking powder, and pecans. Spread into pie plate. Bake for 30 minutes, remove from oven, and let cool completely.

Arrange peach slices on top in two or more layers. Sprinkle each layer with cinnamon (and a little sugar if the peaches are not very sweet). Top with whipped cream to cover the peaches completely. Chill before serving.

I like to reserve one peach, cut it into bite-sized pieces, and fold it into the whipped cream before topping the pie.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make peach pie with a meringue crust!

This is hands down my best recipe. It’s the one everyone at work wants me to bring for our end-of-semester potluck meetings. Even people who don’t really like peaches, pies, or me rave over this pie. And the best part is it’s really easy to make even though it looks difficult. You don’t even need to make pie pastry.

You do, however, need to whip egg whites to make a meringue crust. You’ll need an electric mixer for this, and you’ll need the mixer again at the end of the recipe to make whipped cream. Other than that, you’ll just need a pie plate, a large mixing bowl, and a lot of fresh peaches.

I’ve tried making this recipe with frozen peach slices, thawed. They were disappointing but if you can’t find decent fresh peaches and you want to make this recipe, you can use them. But really good fresh peaches are what make this recipe so good. The juice seeps down into the meringue and infuses the whipped cream with summer goodness.

Get the ripest peaches you can find, and buy more than you think you’ll need because when you’re getting really ripe peaches, inevitably one or more will turn out to be on the rotten side of overripe. Since the peaches aren’t baked, you don’t want to include any that don’t taste perfect. You also shouldn’t use peaches that turn out to be underripe. If you end up with just one or two decent peaches, that’s okay. I’ve made this recipe with only a single layer of peach slices and it’s turned out fine.

But whatever you do, reserve the very best peach to go in the whipped cream. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The very first thing you do, once you’ve got all your ingredients and mixing bowls and things, is crush up the crackers. You need exactly 14 saltines, with each single square counting as one cracker. If you have the type that are two crackers joined together into one, that counts as two crackers.

Get out a small bowl, like a cereal bowl, and use your hands to roughly crunch the crackers into the bowl the way you would if you were adding them to soup or chili. Then use the back of a spoon to further crush the pieces finer and finer. Eventually it becomes virtually impossible to get all the pieces crushed any finer—you’ll end up with basically cracker dust around the edges with slightly larger pieces in the middle, and no amount of stirring and crushing seems to make a difference. That’s fine.

Next, measure out your pecans and put them in the same bowl with the crackers. Add the baking powder on top and mix the whole thing up with the spoon a little bit, until the baking powder isn’t sitting there in a lump. Set the bowl aside.

Set the vanilla and measuring spoon where you can get