Pie perfection!

Hello Pavel,

What does the lard give for the pastry eventually? What happens if the butter substitutes for the lard?

We call lard shortening because it gives short crust pastry the ‘crumbly’ texture. Yes, you can use all butter instead.

Is it better to cut by knifes the mixture of cold butter and lard with flour and cold water to keep it chilled until touching by hands shortly at the end to make a smooth pastry and still keeping it chilled though?

When making shortcrust pastry you need to keep it cool. If you cut the fat to you can reduce the amount of time that you use our fingers which natural will warn the fat.

What for does the pastry have to be rest in the fridge? Is it better to keep it there for one hour?

You need to rest the pastry in the fridge so the gluten relaxes and then the pastry will not shrink as much when it is baked. If you leave the pastry in the fridge longer you will need to take it out of the fridge before you need to roll and it will be too hard. If you try and roll it when it is very hard it will crack and stretch. 

All the oven have their inherent features, please, explain a way to define the right time to turn off the oven to avoid partial fall of the meringue? Is there a clue to catch the time to turn off the oven after the moment the meringue stops rising?

The best thing you can do is get an oven thermometer to make sure your oven is the correct temperature – Then you can allow the recipe as published – which have been tested many times in different ovens.

Please, measure specified 3 tablespoons of cornflour in grams. The lemon curd was runny.

35g

It seems that the recipe can be a bit lighter if a berry soufflé substitutes for the lemon curd. I would be grateful to you if you could suggest a perfect recipe.

Sorry you’ve stumped me there! Berries are wet and they will make the pastry wet and give off more moisture – you will probably get wet pastry and wet meringue. However, we do have a tested recipe for rhubarb meringue pie which you could ‘covert’ and uses berries instead if the rhubarb.

Kind regards

Lindsey

PS… I haven’t had time to do the lemon curd soufflés yet – sorry. I’m going away soon and will be back early September so hopefully I will find a moment when I get back.

Hello Pavel,

Lemon curs is intensely lemony. Custard in either of these recipes would be bland.

Kind regards

Lindsey