Olivia Piepmeier

Lazy Lime Pie

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Thursday, July 6, 2023
Category: dessert
On the left surrounded by simple stars says "Lazy Lime Pie cross section" with an illustration of the cross section in the middle with "filling" "crackers" and "dish" below in the colors that they are above in the illustration - filling is light lime green, crackers are brown, and the dish is light blue.

inspired by Food52

Ingredients

  • 2, 14-ounce cans sweetened condensed milk
  • 2 cups heavy cream
  • Enough limes for 1/2 c. juice (how many limes? depends on their size! maybe buy…8 and be open to having leftovers)
  • A couple sleeves of buttery crackers (think Ritz or Town House or…whatever cracker you want. No, I haven’t tried the sourdough ones yet…)

Directions

  1. Get out a 1 or 2 cup liquid measuring cup, a medium bowl, a zester, and whatever you use to juice citrus.
  2. Zest one lime into the medium bowl then juice it into the measuring cup.
  3. Keep doing this one lime at a time until you have 1/2 c. juice.
  4. Add the juice to the bowl with the zest.
  5. Add the condensed milk and heavy cream to the bowl and stir until it’s all combined.
  6. Spread about a cup’s worth of the mixture on the bottom of a deep-dish pie plate, an oval casserole, or a similar large shallow dish.
  7. Top with a single layer of crackers.
  8. Repeat, alternating layers of filling and crackers, until the dish is full being sure to finish with a layer of filling (I prefer it to be a slightly thicker layer than the others, but you do what you want).
  9. Cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours or overnight—the longer you wait, the more the crackers will soften and meld with the filling.

Thoughts

Is it a pie if there’s no crust? I avoid crusts as much as I can. They’re so much work, and when they go wrong it’s such a bummer (at least to this perfectionist). If given the choice between your standard “key lime pie” and this….I’d do this (similar to my preferences for a frittata vs. quiche).

I purposefully named this not “key lime” as, since I love being as correct as possible, I don’t use key limes. Have you ever juiced key limes? Whew. Little too tedious for me and my tastes are not sophisticated enough to demand such effort. And yet lime juice in a bottle tastes…wrong. So I settle for regular ole limes. I feel like the “pie” part of the title is important though, as it gives you the very correct image of a creamy zesty filling.

Citrus is an ingredient I accept will not be locally sourced, so while I buy it year round, summer time requires lemon and lime treats! This is a great cookout/grilling accompaniment that doesn’t require your oven and is delightfully refreshing, albeit rich.