Buttermilk Pie – The Best Pie You’ve Never Heard Of
I can understand certain recipes being relatively unknown, but this buttermilk pie is not one of them. Not only is this easy to make, and beautiful to look at, it's also bursting with the kind of bright, tangy flavor that no other custard-style pie can touch. Like I said in the video, this is sort of like a vanilla custard, meets lemon meringue pie, meets very light cheesecake. Except better.
I've never had much trouble finding buttermilk, even in regular, non-fancy grocery stores, but depending on where you live in the world, apparently that's not the case. There are many "hacks" for making a substitute, usually using milk and lemon juice, or vinegar, and I'll let you Google those at your leisure, but I'd be more inclined to try some yogurt, thinned out with some milk.
I think that would be closer to the tanginess of buttermilk, but as far as the recipe "working," one cup of any type of dairy product should yield similar results. Once your pie is made, it can be served "as is," or topped with seasonal fruit. I went with raspberries, mostly for the pictures, but if you were going to do this for the holidays, some persimmons, and/or pomegranate seeds would also be very nice. Regardless of how you serve it, I really do hope you give this a try soon. Enjoy!
Ingredients for one pie:
- Enough pie dough for a 9-inch pie dish
- (I used half a recipe of our butter crust dough)
- For the filling:
- 1 1/2 cups white sugar
- 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temp
- 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
- 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
- 3 large eggs
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/8 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
- zest from one lemon
- juice from one lemon juice
- 1 cup buttermilk
- - Prebake crust at 350 F. for 15-20 minutes, let cool, then fill and bake for another 45-55 minutes, or until the filling is golden and “set.”