The Jean Greene Chocolate Pie

This recipe is not for the instant dessert enthusiast...it takes a lot of tedious time but the outcome is absolutely phenomenal!! My mom has been making these pies for YEARS and just recently I got the recipe and got to watch it from start to finish a few times to get all of the techniques she uses to make it happen. We were invited to a dinner party/reunion and we were asked to bring the dessert and my mom said we could do the pies and once she mentioned it...there was no way we WEREN'T going to take the pies. They were nearly demolished...I may be taking my hand at it this weekend for Jason's family weekend...I hope I can keep up this fabulous recipe for many years to come!


Jean Greene's Chocolate Meringue Pie

Pie Ingredients

1 Frozen Pie Crust such as Mrs. Smith, thawed
1¼ cups sugar
¼ cup flour
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 stick margarine
1 tsp vanilla
4 egg yolks
1¼ cup milk (I wouldn't get too skimpy here...we use 2%)
Dash of salt

Meringue Ingredients

Sugar
4 egg whites


Preheat Oven to 350 degrees.

Thaw 1 Frozen Pie Crust and using a fork, poke several holes. Place in the oven and bake for just a few minutes. The holes in the crust keep it from puckering and bubbling. Once pie crust is warm, take it out of the oven and set on counter.

Don't turn off oven and increase heat to 400 degrees

Beat egg yolks until smooth. In a thick stainless steel dutch oven, combine milk, butter, salt, eggs and vanilla extract. Turn to medium/medium-high and allow butter to melt and the mixture to get hot.
**The more melted you get the butter mixture the quicker the next part begins**

Combine sugar, flour and cocoa in a large bowl, mix well.

Fold in the mixture while using a whisk, stir stir stir.

You will need to continuously stir or else the mixture will scorch or will cling to the bottom of your pan. Don't stop stirring until the mixture is nearly too thick to stir anymore. This does take a while so just be patient.

Once your mixture is super thick, pour into your pie crust.

Next move on to the meringue. Make sure that you don't drop even the smallest piece of yolk when making your meringue or else you will not be able to fluff the meringue.

Using a mixer, whip your egg whites, folding in sugar (no exact measurement...I'm guessing we used around a half a cup per pie). You will whip...and whip...and whip until you get the desired "height" for your meringue. After baking the meringue tends to go down so make sure you have plenty of "fluff" for the top of your pies. We fluffed until we had almost a whole medium mixing bowl full of meringue.

Spoon the meringue mixture onto the pie, swirling to create little tips all across the pie. Make sure you cover the entire pie leaving no spaces showing.

Place pie into the oven and when you start seeing the meringue brown up around your swirls...your pie is done! Let cool and serve!

You will be the new fan favorite if you make this dessert. I will have to let you know how it goes when I try it solo!