Individual Lilikoi Chiffon Pie served with sweetened whipped cream and seasonal fruit

I was wandering around a local grocery store a few days ago and found fresh passion fruit. My Aunty Ivy made an amazing Lilikoi Chiffon Pie, though I often wonder how she had time to be such a great cook and baker. She was a world class swimmer, she was a lifelong volunteer for Hawaii’s Special Olympics program, a teacher and just an all around good egg. You can read more about my Aunty Ivy here. On a trip back to the Mainland a few years ago, she sent Kim and I home with an entire pie and it served as breakfast on our 10 hour flight back to NJ from HI. Sadly, my Aunty lost her lengthy battle with cancer last year and I don’t have her recipe. I’m pretty sure at one point her recipe was published but I was not able to track it down for this post. With that said, here’s my version of Lilikoi Chiffon Pie.

To start the pie you will need to have a prepared pie crust. I opted for a Graham Cracker Coconut crust. You can make this in a standard 9″ pie plate. You’ll need 1 ½ cups of graham cracker crumbs, 1 stick of butter, ¼ cup of sugar, dash of salt and ¼ cup of finely shredded toasted coconut. In a large bowl combine, sugar, coconut, salt and graham cracker crumbs. Melt the stick of butter and let cool. Add the cooled butter to the crumb mixture and blend together. Press the crumbs onto the bottom and side of the pie plate and bake the crust at 370 for 7 minutes or until the edges start to brown. Let the crust cool on a cooling rack then store in the fridge.

You can still make this recipe even if you do not have access to fresh lilikoi. Whole Foods carries a decent lilikoi juice made by Ceres and ethnic markets may carry frozen lilikoi pulp. I removed the pulp from 8 passion fruits and augmented that with 1 cup of the Ceres Juice, I simmered the mixture until it was reduced by ½. This took about 45 minutes. I blended the mixture down with a stick blender then strained it to remove the seeds and set it aside to cool. I intentionally made more juice than the pie requires because I’m going to make lilikoi curd for a later post.

I bloomed 1 packet of Knox gelatin in ¼ cup of passion fruit juice. You can use plain water or lemon juice as well. While the gelatin is blooming I cooked 4 egg yolks and ½ cup of sugar in a double boiler over water at a slow boil until it had thickened and the sugar was dissolved, this takes about 5-8 minutes. You will need to whisk this constantly so make sure you have every thing prepped before you start this step. Once the mixture thickened I pulled it from the heat and added the gelatin and whisked until the gelatin was thoroughly incorporated. Then I added ½ cup of lilikoi juice and 2TBS of lemon juice and let the mixture sit at room temperature to cool. Once the mixture cools, Whip 4 egg whites, to soft peaks slowly working in ¼ cup of sugar continue to whip to firm peaks. Fold ¼ of the egg whites into the lilikoi mixture until  the egg whites are fully incorporated. Keep adding egg whites and folding in until all the egg whites have been encorporated. Pour mixture into the prepared pie shell and chill in the fridge for at least 4 hours before serving Finish pie with sweetened whip cream.

Ingredients

Crust

1 ½ cups graham cracker crumbs

1 stick of melted and cooled unsalted butter

¼ cup toasted and shredded coconut

¼ cup sugar

dash of salt

Chiffon pie filling

4 whole eggs separated with the whites and yolks retained

½ cup sugar

1 packet of unflavored gelatin

¼ cup liquid to bloom gelatin

½ cup lilikoi pulp/nectar/juice

Whip Cream

1 cup heavy whipping cream

1/4 cup sugar

1 tsp vanilla