Gluten Free Lemon Meringue Pie from scratch is easy to achieve with this recipe! Enjoy the fresh lemony-tartness of classic, old fashioned pie with the best traditional-style gluten free crust.
Made without cornstarch or cream of tartar and with pure, freshly-squeezed lemon juice and raw cane sugar, it's a fresh, new version of your old favourite.
Gluten Free Blind Pie Crust
The gluten free crust for this lemon meringue pie is made from the same great recipe that my other gluten free pies begin with. With just a few tweaks in the way we use it, it can make a pretty terrific blind crust. Little blind-baked crusts are pretty awesome in Mini Lemon Tartlets.
What Does Blind Baking a Crust Mean?
Blind baking is pre-baking a pie crust before you put the filling in.
How to Blind Bake a Pie Crust
There are a couple of pitfalls to avoid with blind baking. The first is that it could puff up rather than lying flat. To prevent this, use a fork to poke the crust full of lots of little holes all over the bottom and sides before baking.
Do the sides of your pie crust fall down during baking? There are a couple of steps you can take to keep this from happening. With my Best Gluten Free Pie Crust, roll extra flour into the dough for crusts that will be blind baked. A drier dough will have less tendency to collapse.
Also, fill the crust with some sort of pie weights. First, wet a sheet of parchment paper. Crumple it up into a ball. Then spread it out over the pie crust. This will keep your pie weights clean and easily removed after baking.
One more precaution to ensure success in blind baking is to chill the crust. Once you've rolled out your pie crust, placed it in the pan and pricked it full of little holes, chill it in the refrigerator for awhile. You can do this before or after inserting the crumpled parchment and whichever type of weights you are using.
How Can You Blind Bake a Pie Crust without Weights?
You can purchase pie weights, little ceramic or metal balls designed especially for the purpose of holding down a pie shell during blind baking. You don't need them, though. In fact, I prefer to use dried beans as pie weights. With beans, you can use as many as necessary to completely fill up the pie crust. I have found in the past that my purchased pie weights weren't enough to fill up the pie shell as much as I'd like.
What Happens if You Don't Use Pie Weights?
If you don't use pie weights for blind baking, you're likely to have problems with the pie crust puffing up in the centre and caving in around the sides.
Dried beans will work just as well, if not better, than specialized pie weights.
Gluten Free Lemon Meringue Filling
This recipe calls for freshly-squeezed lemon juice. Don't be tempted to substitute it with the bottled stuff! Using tangy, freshly-squeezed real lemons makes a world of difference to the flavour of this pie. It takes it from "okay" to fantastic!
This gluten free lemon meringue pie filling is thickened with tapioca flour. This helps it to keep the translucent quality that is so nice in lemon meringue filling.
While not completely dairy free, this pie filling is casein free when made with ghee. Casein is the protein in dairy, and some people, including myself, cannot tolerate it.
More Gluten Free Pie Recipes
How to Make Gluten Free Lemon Meringue Pie
Roll out pie crust with plenty of extra flour.
Transfer pastry to pie plate and prick with holes.
Wet and crumple parchment and press it into pie crust.
Fill with beans for pie weights and bake for 15 min. Allow to cool before removing beans and parchment.
Whisk sugar, flour, and water together. Bring to boil for a minute.
Whisk the egg yolks, and whisk some of hot mixture into them. Then whisk it all back into the hot saucepan.
Cook, while whisking constantly, and then remove from heat.
Add lemon juice and butter. As the butter melts, whisk the filling until smooth.
Pour filling into pie shell.
Top with meringue.
Bake until meringue has golden tips. Serve cold.
If you love lemons as much as I do, try..
Lemon Meringue Pie
Equipment
- 9-inch pie plate
- Rolling Pin
Ingredients
- 1 gluten free dough for single pie crust
- extra white rice flour for rolling
- 3 eggs separated
- 1 cup raw cane sugar
- ½ cup tapioca flour
- 1 ½ cup water
- 3 tablespoons butter or ghee
- ½ cup freshly squeezed lemon juice (about 2 or 3 lemons)
- 1 tablespoon raw sugar
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 375°F.
- Roll out the pie crust in a generous amount of rice flour, turning it often, adding flour as you do. There should be enough flour that there is still an excess remaining on the rolling surface after the dough has absorbed as much as possible. (The dough needs to be dryer than usual to withstand blind baking.)
- Place the pie crust into the bottom and up the sides of a 9-inch pie plate so that it extends beyond the upper edges. Turn under the excess, pinching to hook it over the edge of the plate so that it hangs on rather than falling down during baking.
- Prick the bottom and sides liberally with a fork.
- Wet and crumple a sheet of parchment paper. Flatten it out again and gently place it over the bottom and sides of the pie crust. Line with pie weights to hold it in place.
- Bake for 15 minutes. Allow to cool before removing the pie weights and parchment paper.
- Preheat oven to 325°F.
- Separate the three eggs putting the whites into a large mixing bowl, and the yolks into a medium one.
- Whisk the cup of sugar and the flour together in a medium saucepan. Whisk in the water until smooth. Over medium heat, bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Boil for one minute.
- Whisk egg yolks. Whisk half of the hot sugar-flour mixture into the yolks. Then whisk the yolk mixture back into the sugar-flour mixture on the stove. Cook for one more minute.
- Remove from heat. Stir in butter and lemon juice.
- Beat egg whites on high speed. As they begin to thicken and whiten, sprinkle in the tablespoon of sugar. Beat until soft peaks form. This is your meringue.
- Pour the hot lemon filling into the baked pie crust. Smooth or pipe the meringue over the top.
- Bake in 325F oven for 15 to 20 minutes, until the meringue is starting to brown up nicely.
- Allow to cool before serving.
Barbara says
There's too much tapioca flour/starch in this recipe! Filling is chewy. Perhaps GF cornstarch would be a better choice. I added 2 tsp of lemon zest; flavor was good with this adjustment.
Cathy says
Thank you for trying my recipe, Barbara, and for sharing your input. I'm sorry that you found the tapioca flour to be too much. This recipe was created for people who can't eat cornstarch, but if you can tolerate it, go ahead and use it. You will probably need less cornstarch than tapioca starch. The addition of lemon zest seems like a nice idea.
Ron Moss says
I found that using the beans with the parchment, the bottom of the crust was still raw when crust cooled and beans removed. I put it back in the oven with no beans until 3/4 cooked then cooled and added filling and meringe. This was my first attempt at lemon pie. My wife said it’s good enough to serve to company. That is her ultimate complement.
Cathy says
That was a great solution! I'm so glad that your wife liked it!