(upbeat music)
- Hello everyone, it's Barry here,
welcome to My Virgin Kitchen, I hope you are well.
You are looking good today.
Thank you so much to all the nice feedback about the
intro that goes before the videos now.
Took us ages to find it, if you're on Patreon,
the My Virgin Kitchen Patreon you would've seen some
of the other examples of the ones that didn't make
the cut.
Anyhow, enough about that.
Yesterday I was out with Chloe and Phoebe and Mrs. Barry
and Chloe says to me, we saw a lemon meringue pie
where we were eating out and she said,
"Wouldn't it be really cool if there was a transparent
"lemon meringue pie."
And I've now made it my mission today,
I might regret doing this, to try and make a transparent
lemon meringue pie.
You guys know what lemon meringue pie is, hopefully.
You've got that lovely pastry base,
you've got that sort of custardy lemony vibe in the middle,
and of course the spiky meringue topping.
Now we're gonna do all of that except the middle,
rather than the custard thing, we'll hopefully be able
to see through it, alright?
Barry I can see through the pain that you're gonna
experience with trying to do this.
So there's a couple of different ways, I think,
we can do the filling.
And I'm gonna try the one that I think is gonna
work the best.
Let's get going and see what happens.
I'm gonna start off by making life easy for myself
by baking the case.
'Cause we want that super cold for our transparent setting.
Of course you can make short crust pastry yourself,
I've done that before.
(dog barks)
Amy, I was doing a video.
What's the matter?
What's going on.
Sorry about that, of course you can make your own,
you can buy ready made sheets and blocks.
We're using the ready made sheet.
Or if you want to be even lazier you can just buy
a ready made pastry case in it's entirety.
What I've got here is a ready made sheet.
And if you are using these please don't take it
straight from the fridge section in the shop.
Let it sit for at least 40 to 50 minutes,
or put it in the microwave for 10 seconds.
You don't want to rip it.
So if you leave it out it should--
Oh yeah, you can tell the difference, it's warm,
it's not cold, it will crack and that's a nightmare.
I've done that in the past, I've learnt from that.
There we go.
This is a non-stick pie tin, amazing.
If not you can just lightly grease it.
And also loose bottoms because I do not understand
the point of a pie tin without a loose bottom 'cause
you can't get it out without breaking the pie.
Sorry, it's early.
I haven't even had coffee yet, hang on.
Gonna drape it in.
Make sure we lift it up, as well,
and tuck it right in like a carpet and also give it
some overhang because it can shrink back.
One of my favourite tools in the kitchen, scissors.
My sheet didn't fully cover the tin so I'm using
a bit of a strip there just to push that on.
And you can wet your fingers to join it.
Let me just give it like a little haircut.
Reminds me of one of those, is it Mr. Potato Head,
the play doh one where it all came out and you
pressed down?
I always wanted one of those as a kid 'cause you'd
give it a haircut, never got it.
Of course this video is not about the pie base,
but all I'm gonna do is gonna refrigerate it so the
pastry kind of firms up a bit more.
Otherwise if you bake it, it could shrink.
The baking beads will help with that too.
So put this in the fridge for like 10 minutes.
Meanwhile your preheat your oven to 180 C fan or
equivalent.
The full method is on my website by the way.
Bake it until it's just starting to go lightly
golden brown.
Once you're at that stage take out those baking beads
and just bake for another couple of minutes just to
cook the bottom bit.
And that'll be your crust done.
So I'll show you that in a bit.
Right, so that's the easy bit done.
Let me tell you about my thinking for this filling.
When it comes to making a jelly, Jell-o, filling I found
that platinum grade gelatin sheets work the best
for getting an almost clear set.
But then I look back and think about the bobble thing
that I tried to do over Christmas.
That still haunts my dreams.
I want to do it again, though.
Basically what you'll do is combine the gelatin sheets
with a liquid mixture of your choice.
So we're gonna try and make it a bit lemony.
And there was two ways of thinking about this.
The first method will involve mixing water with some
sugar and also some lemon extract,
which is surpr-- (dog barks)
Amy!
Mate, it's just a tub of sugar.
As I was saying, this first base will involve mixing
water, which is needed for all of it, okay?
Or I wonder if you could use like sprite or lemonade.
Sugar to sweeten it up and this is some lemon extract,
which is actually surprisingly easy to get ahold of.
I ordered some on Amazon which is arriving today.
I went to my local store and they actually
already sell it.
So that's possibly the most easiest option for you.
Now the reason I'm not gonna do this is I put a little
bit of this in a tub last night and I noticed it was
a little bit cloudy, kind of like how lemon juice was,
because I was gonna do lemon juice, as well.
Then the other day for the homemade Mozzarella video,
which you guys loved, thank you very much for that,
I want to do more homemade cheese, homemade (mumbles),
I might even do the Mozzarella again, I don't know.
Thank you.
I bought some citric acid, which I never thought I'd
need any use for again.
So what I'm gonna do is combine this citric acid
with sugar and water to try and get a lemony sherbet
tang vibe.
So the cool thing is with either method you could kind
of balance the water and sherbet and extract lemony
ratio until you like the taste of it and that's it.
Amy's being very needy today.
What do you want?
Maybe she's a fan of lemon meringue.
Wash me hands.
So kind of like a deck of cards there are our
gelatin sheets.
I like the actual pattern on it, it reminds me of my
mum's old windows at her house.
So all you want to do, it doesn't matter about the
amount of water in this bowl,
it just needs to be cold and there needs to be
enough of it.
So you just separate your cards, or your sheets.
Deal out your cards like you're in Las Vegas and
let them soak and they'll kind of go like--
These are like snappy and cardy now.
They'll go saggy.
They'll loosen up, basically.
So we can just leave this, make sure they're separated
apart, just leave it for like five minutes so we can
start to make the base mixture.
Which is where your water amount needs to kind of
be specific.
Or roughly what you think will fill your pie dish.
This is roughly 800 mils of water so I think that's
approximately what will fit in me pie dish.
I'm gonna add in 100 grammes of sugar.
Got a big old lump in there.
In that goes.
As you can see that's gone cloudy, but if I mix it,
I'm hoping that--
Oh yeah, see?
It has basically gone back to being transparent again,
it's not cloudy.
Whereas if you put lemon juice and extract in, as I say,
it will be slightly cloudy.
Trust me, it'll be fine.
But I really want to get this transparency thing.
Now, citric acid--
Is quite tangy direct.
But by combining it by the sugar and watering it down
it should be quite nice.
Certainly like a zesty vibe, you know?
Which will compliment the jelly really well.
I did some research into citric acid and it's actually
scary what stuff it's in.
And it's got loads of good health benefits.
And you know when you were younger you got those, like,
really tangy sweets, you're like,
"Mate, check out this head exploder sweet,"
it's just basically laced with more of this stuff.
So in conclusion what I'm gonna do to get the
opposite of that is just do it in very small batches.
This is a quarter teaspoon at a time.
Sprinkle it in, get me spoon.
See how that's not even changed the transparency of it?
And you are actually gonna have to taste this.
Oh wow.
And extra quarter of a teaspoon and then mix it.
You're kind of gonna get the drill here.
Just keep going until you're happy with how it tastes.
But it might not work and that's my job.
Oh my gosh, I'm super happy with that.
Do you know what, I'll have that as a drink.
In fact, if I carbonate that I've probably made it
lemonade.
Where's my soda stream?
Do you know what, I've never had a soda stream,
I want to do that for a gadget video.
So we've got our base made and yours might looks slightly
different with the lemon extract in there,
it might be a little bit cloudy, as I say.
But that's cool.
Because we haven't ruined anything just yet.
Now these sheets, can you see that?
They're nice and droopy now.
Really, really droopy.
So what we're gonna do, wow that played with the colours,
didn't it, the camera?
Ah!
It's like you just woke up.
We'll take a large sauce pan,
get your sheets, okay, and make sure you squeeze
as much of the water out of it as you can.
Kind of like a towel.
Towel?
And then just drop them in your pan.
So just draining those sheets off, in the pan,
that's our citric water we need in a minute,
and then you can just discard that water, okay?
Drink it if you want.
Right, okay, so-- Oh my gosh.
Our jelly sheets, our dried out sheets and the citric
water now are gonna combine.
And all we're gonna do is put this pan onto a low flame.
Grab your wooden spoon from before and then just
keep mixing it over the low heat until it dissolves.
The gelatin dissolves, you don't need to boil it,
as far as I know.
Alright the water in that pan is as smooth as
a baby's bum.
That's still pretty transparent, I'm happy with that.
So I've poured it into a jug because this will cool down
quicker rather than being in a hot pan and also it'll
be easier for me to pour it into my pie dish
in a minute.
I say in a minute, I actually in about an hour's time
'cause I've got to get my pie out of the oven,
let it cool down, and meanwhile I'll take these
guys for a walk.
Which if you want to see, I'll show you that on
this week's vlog.
So we'll fast forward to the pie case being ready
and our jelly mixture cooled down.
Just got back from dog walk number one,
the sun is coming out a little bit so we're gonna
have to just try and work around that.
This is probably the most will it/wont it step.
If this doesn't work-- (groans)
We'll just have to walk the dogs again in a bit
if this does work so, exercise.
This is my base, it's nice and chilled,
and I've actually just put the jug of the jelly in
the fridge just to try and start the firm up a little bit.
To try and give it a bit of support and stop it leaking,
maybe, I'm gonna use some foil to line the outer edge
of the pie case.
Kind of like when you buy a mini pit in the shop.
In this jar is some lemon curd and I really still want
it to give a strong lemon flavour.
So hopefully it might also act as a tiny bit of
a shield from our gelatin by lining the base with some
lemon curd.
I love this stuff.
I'm just gonna spread it out thinly.
Gonna try and get it up at a little bit of the
crust, as well.
So it's gonna be like lemon flavour,
but also hopefully act as a little bit of a sealant.
I just hope the jelly doesn't merge with it.
You know what, I think that's really gonna help it.
I'm gonna put it in the fridge for maybe five,
10 minutes to try and get that curd to grip to it
and then we'll stick the jelly on top.
Okay between you, vlog, and you transparent lemon meringue
pie video, I'm really worried right now.
It's got to work, hasn't it?
Why wouldn't it work?
Please work.
Oh wow.
It's sitting on top of the curd.
Let's just do a little bit.
I don't think it's moving.
It's totally holding.
I don't know what to do.
I'm not gonna very carefully try and put this
in the fridge.
(dramatic music)
That was the longest walk of my life.
Alright now we just wait.
Boston and Amy are keeping an eye on it for me.
It was freezing out there.
Me and the dogs got very cold, indeed,
but speaking of cold I think it's worked.
I'm not gonna show you just yet,
we're gonna move onto our meringue topping.
You hear that drilling?
You might not, hopefully you don't.
But you guys wanted me to keep it real,
that homey feel.
There's some, I think it's the water board digging up
the roads outside with drills.
Amazing, they didn't even let me know.
This is how I like to make meringue.
This is four room temperature medium egg whites.
And this is half a teaspoon of cream of tartar,
it's a raising agent, not essential but I find it helps
to keep the peaks stiff.
(mixer whirring)
This is the on I prefer using anyway,
but didn't realise we still had this.
I couldn't find the whisk attachment for it.
So a nice steady slow whisk at first,
and it helps to have a big bowl, too.
So I'm just gonna slowly increase the speed until
we get it nice and big in volume and then we'll start
to add in the sugar.
Boom.
Add the sugar in in batches, like three spoonfuls
at a time.
Until it's just dissolved, keep adding the rest,
and I'm just gonna finish it up now.
See that?
That's what we want, baby.
You could pipe this if you want,
but I'm just gonna make mine rough.
Alright, this is a chef's blowtorch to hopefully
toast the meringue.
If you're gonna try and bake it I don't think
that's gonna work 'cause the jelly will go all funny.
But then again, baked Alaska works, doesn't it?
Maybe try it.
But I didn't tell you to do that.
I'm trying to be really careful with it 'cause
I think it needs teeny bit of a longer set,
but I'm too excited.
We have got a transparent pie and it's all held in.
Luckily some of these cracks held together,
but the lemon curd, I think it's kind of mingled.
I'm gonna splodge on my meringue.
It's like putting meringue on a waterbed or something.
Just grabbing a bamboo skewer and just doing a few
spikes in it.
See that?
(dramatic music)
Oh my God.
That looks amazing.
(upbeat music)
I'm just gonna show you the slice.
Oh yeah.
Check that out! We have done it.
A transparent lemon meringue pie.
That is so clear.
In fact, with the lemon curd in there,
maybe it's giving it a slightly yellowy tinge
a teeny bit, but other than that, I am over the moon
with it.
I'm not gonna lie, I had a cheeky piece.
Look.
(gibbering)
Look how clear that is.
Oh my God.
There's the freshness sort of sherbet tang of the jelly,
you've got that lemon curd just keeping it in line,
the meringue on top and that crust, all chilled.
It's gorgeous.
We did well my friend.
It was a long battle, but I've got loads there
and still have a pie in the corner.
I'm just relieved, I think.
Storage wise I don't think it's gonna be great
because I think the meringue and the jelly in the fridge
won't work, it might weep.
So I think that you need to make it on the day almost
immediately that you want to eat it.
If you enjoyed this video don't forget to give it
a thumbs up and subscribe.
There is a playlist full of loads of other baking
recipes to check out.
If you want to see more things like this,
follow me on social media @myvirginkitchen
and send me pictures of any recipe attempts you've done,
love you lots.
We did it.
I am, I'm like, woo!
Proud, I'm a proud dad.