French Silk pie has a special taste beyond just plain chocolate. I looked at several recipes online but they’re all very different from each other and I didn’t see any “aha!” ingredient. What is it that makes French Silk French Silk?
Huh- you are brave to try and make it. I usually just grab mine from Marie Callender’s… I can’t locate their recipe yet, though.
I’m not necessarily trying to make it, I’m just trying to figure out what makes it taste the way it does. I figured looking at the recipes was a good way, but no dice.
Back in the olden days of the 1950s, when I learned to bake (while vacuuming and wearing a string of pearls, of course), the distinctive ingredient of French silk pie was raw eggs. :eek:
pinkfreud is correct regarding the raw eggs. The general gist of the recipes I have call for creaming the butter and sugar, blending in the chocolate and vanilla, adding the eggs (beating well after adding each), pouring into a pre-baked pie shell and refrigerating. The eggs are never cooked.
While “cooking” with raw eggs is no longer considered acceptable by the Food Police, you should get almost identical, yet safer, results with the pasteurized-in-the-shell eggs available at most supermarkets now.
I think you haven’t found the aha! ingredient because it’s not so much about taste as about richness and texture. The extra fat of the eggs makes the chocolate linger on the tongue, so you taste some of the flavors of chocolate that you usually don’t. It’s closer to a custard than to a pudding.
My resident French Silk Expert* says WhyNot has it closest: She says that it’s a lot of eggs, therefore a lot of fat, with the roughly six days worth of beating you do between adding each egg, which creates that inimitable texture.
- soon-to-be-ex-Mrs. ToKnow
iiiiiiiiiiinteresting. Man I want one.
When I think french silk chocolate pie I think egg yolks. This is the french addition, richer custard.
A French Silk pie or a soon-to-be-ex?
The pie. I’m about to move in with my soon-to-be-very-much-not-ex
Hmmm. This is the most delectable of my Mom’s delectable line of desserts. She would make it for company and then my brother and I would get a piece the next day for breakfast. Mom’s French silk pie (with her amazing pastry) and real whipped cream…nothing like it.
Is it the white sugar crunching between your teeth as you eat it? Is it the so very rich chocolate taste? Is it the elusiveness of the right consistency? aka mine always fall flat.
All I know is beating each egg for five minutes as you add them one by one. It’s the reason I got a stand mixer.
So I think it’s the consistency, with goes beyond custard. It’s denser and richer and more better.
I’m confused, but I’m fat so I might have an excuse, but, if she knows how to make French Silk Pie, how can you let her go?
sugar crunching?
:mad: If you are whupping it like you should, it should be impossibly smooth and silky!!
It is the only dessert I made that my aunts actually liked. 
Sounds like a bake-off is in order, just to be sure. 
Woohoo! Can I judge?