Emeril Lagasse's coconut cream pie recipe makes a creamy, delicious coconut custard pie with a flaky crust. With toasted coconut on top, this is the perfect coconut cream pie recipe!
My fifteen year old daughter celebrated Official 
Day by baking this super rich and dreamy Coconut Cream Pie for her high school math class. Students that participated in the exercise were promised to receive extra credit for their efforts. In my opinion, that is never a bad thing when it comes to grades.
Pi Day: March 14 is Pi Day, a sacred celebration in which radius and circumference lovers rejoice over circular snacks and decimal-reciting contests. Pi (Greek letter “π”) is the symbol used in mathematics to represent a constant — the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — which is approximately 3.14159. -- By Charyn Pfeuffer
This was Shannon's first attempt at making a cream pie from scratch. She did an excellent job making Emeril Lagasse's coconut cream pie recipe, needing only a few cooking tips from mom! She also made a great first impression on her teacher with her pie baking skills, eliciting an exuberant, "I need that recipe" response!
Shannon not only impressed her teacher with near perfect execution of this cream pie recipe, she also recited, from memory, twenty places of PI: 3.14159265897323846264! She won the class competition and earned herself a cake made by her teacher. We celebrated with her favorite dinner, Picnic Pork Roast.
My favorite recipe for coconut cream pie is made by Emeril Lagasse. No need to reinvent the wheel when you have a foolproof recipe!
Emeril Lagasse's coconut cream pie recipe rocks!
Coconut Cream Pie
Ingredients
- 1 pre baked 9 inch pie crust cooled and set aside
- 2 ¼ cups whole milk
- ¾ cups sugar ¼ cup reserved for egg whites
- 3 eggs separated whites in separate bowl
- ¼ cup cornstarch
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 ½ cups coconut for filling ¼ cup toasted for garnish
- 1 tablespoon butter
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
- In a saucepan, whisk the 2 cups of milk and ¾ cup sugar together
- Place the pan over medium heat and bring liquid up to a simmer
- Whisk the egg yolks together
- Temper the hot milk into the egg yolks (to temper: add 1 tablespoon hot milk to eggs, whisk, ad additional 2 tablespoons hot milk 1 tablespoon at a time and whisk between additions)
- Slowly whisk tempered egg mixture into the hot milk mixture
- In a small bowl, dissolve the cornstarch in the remaining ¼ cup milk, making a slurry
- Whisk slurry into hot milk mixture
- Bring liquid to a boil and reduce to a simmer
- Cook mixture, stirring constantly, until the filling is thick, about 3-4 minutes
- Fold in the vanilla, plain coconut, and butter
- Mix well
- Pour filling into baked pie shell, cool completely
- Using an electric mixer, whip the egg whites to soft peaks, add remaining sugar and whip egg whites to stiff peaks
- Spread egg whites over the top of the pie, smooth whites evenly over filling
- Sprinkle toasted coconut over pie
- Place pie in a preheated 350 degree F.oven, bake for 3-4 minutes or until meringue is golden brown
Notes
Place ¼ coconut in a nonstick pan, cook over medium heat until brown, to keep from burning, stir constantly Adapted from Rebecka Evans 3-14-14
Laura Dembowski (@piesandplots)
I made this pie awhile ago and absolutely loved it. Yours is beautiful with the bruleed meringue!
athomewithrebecka
Welcome Laura! Thank you for your compliment. I was thrilled to find the recipe worked so well. I think I'm going to experiment with the filling by adding other flavors, ie chocolate, butterscotch, lemon etc. It's one of the best cream base fillings I've ever tasted, and super easy to make. Have an awesome weekend!