Key lime pie

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Key lime pie is a dessert made of key lime juice, eggs, condensed milk and sugar in a pre-baked pie or unbaked graham cracker crust. The pie is then baked, often with a meringue on its top. Other recipes (with slightly different ingredients) call for it to be chilled or frozen. This makes it a popular summer dessert. The dish is named after the small key limes (Citrus aurantifolia 'Swingle') that are naturalized throughout the Florida Keys. Their ferocious thorns make them less tractable, their thin yellowish rind makes them less shippable, but they are both tarter and more aromatic than the common Persian limes seen year round in most U.S. grocery stores.

Proper 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.

Key lime juice, unlike regular lime juice, is a pale yellow. As such, Key lime pies are also pale yellow.^[1] Green Key lime pies, such as the one in the opening scene of Natural Born Killers, are not authentic,^[2] and the green color is due to added food coloring. To the dismay of aficionados, many "Key lime" pies are made with standard Persian limes since they tend to be larger and yield more juice, thus making them easier to work with.

Authentic Key lime pies are topped with meringue before baked. Mail order and commercial brands use some other form of whipped topping, since the delicate meringue topping does not ship well and shrinks down and bleeds out sugar in droplets after a few hours. For this reason authentic Key lime pies cannot be obtained by mail order, or in most retail stores. Alas, many popular chain restaurants that have "Key lime pie" on their menus are not serving authentic Key lime pie to their patrons. Aside from being green, the other most obvious clue that the pie is not authentic is that it's topped with a whipped cream concoction, rather than meringue.

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.

Many local Florida Keys businesses also sell related Key Lime candies, beverages, cookies, etc.

As of July 1, 2006, Key Lime Pie is the Florida state pie.^[3]

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