This is a recipe for a delicious Bahamanian fresh coconut pie. The filling is pretty much pure coconut (and sugar). None of this coconut-flavoured custard and whipped cream nonsense. I mean, not that I don't also love coconut cream pie. But this Caribbean-style fresh coconut pie is on a whole 'nother level!

The filling is very simple: just coconut, water, sugar, and vanilla. It gets cooked and poured into an unbaked pie shell. It's then meant to be topped with a lattice crust. And that does sound lovely. Unfortunately, it's also meant to use the special Bahamanian sweet pastry, which I did make, but was having a lot of difficulty working with. After many attempts at rolling it out and making my pie shell, I finally settled on using it as a press-in crust for the bottom and then very carefully dropping a solid sheet of pastry over top for the upper crust. The top crust ended up tearing in half, so the finished pie had a big split down the centre, but it still baked up fine and was definitely easier than trying to mess about with a lattice top.

Anyway, despite my pastry fumbling, the pie turned out very nicely! Everyone seemed to like it and it definitely packs a much more concentrated coconut punch than a coconut cream pie.

Photo goes here.

Fresh Coconut Pie

From Mom's Bahamanian cookbook

Ingredients

• 2 c. grated fresh coconut
• 1 c. sugar
• 1 1/2 c. water
• 2 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1/2 recipe Bahamanian sweet pastry

Directions

1. Combine coconut, sugar, and water and bring to a boil over medium heat.
2. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer, uncovered, until thickened (~30 minutes).
3. Remove from heat, stir in vanilla, and set aside to cool.
4. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 180°C (350°F) and roll out half the pastry (1/4 of the amount the recipe makes) and use it to line a 23cm (9") pie plate.
5. Pour the filling into the uncooked pie shell.
6. Roll out the remaining portion of pastry and either place it on top of the filled pie or cut it into strips and weave a lattice top over the pie.
7. Crimp the edges to seal.
8. Bake at 180°C (350°F) until filling is set and pastry is cooked through and well-browned (30-45 minutes).

This pastry challenged me. It didn't sound complicated, but the proportions and procedure were very different from what I'm used to for pastry.

My usually pastry is just a standard shortcrust; a simple butter-and-flour-plus-a-bit-of-water affair. But I've also made sweet shortcrust, rough puff, sourdough shortcrust, hot water crust, and a few others. They all have their differences and I find some of them easier to work with than others, but I feel reasonably comfortable with all of them. This was unlike any other pastry I've ever made before.

Honestly, this dough doesn't even really look or taste like pastry to me. What it really seems like is sugar cookie dough!

Everything about how it's made, looks, tastes, and handles really seems very sugar cookie-esque to me. And yet it's apparently meant to be a roll-out pastry.

Unfortunately, being so high in sugar and relatively low in flour, I couldn't really get mine to roll out properly. I tried! I really did! But it just kept tearing. No matter how careful and gentle I tried to be. Eventually I just decided to treat it as a press-in crust and mashed all the bits together until they'd formed something contiguous and relatively even.

I couldn't use that technique for the top crust, but luckily I was able to get that into place with only one big tear down the middle.

I did try to follow the recipe for this! I started by creaming the fat and sugar together just as specified. I swapped in some lard for the shortening because that's what I had on hand, but I kept all the proportions the same. I mixed in the vanilla, eggs, baking powder, and evaporated milk just like it said. And then I mixed in the 3 c. of flour. And ended up with a dough so wet that there was no question of even attempting to roll it out. I might have been able to turn it into drop cookies, but that's about it.

After mixing in an entire additional cup of flour, it was still very soft, but seemed like, with sufficient care and a well-floured surface, I might be able to at least attempt rolling it. And that was without the 3 Tbsp. of water called for in the recipe!

It rolled okay, but stuck to the work surface fairly easily, so I had to be quite generous with the flour -- which it took up extremely readily! Once it was rolled out though, I could barely even look at it without it tearing. No amount of care and flour seemed to be sufficient to keep it when transferred from the bench to the pie plate. So, as noted, I ended up resorting to treating it as a press-in dough for the bottom crust and using it that way. And, for the top crust, I had to just resign myself to having a huge tear down the centre.

So, as you can see, not the easiest pastry to work with. But it does taste nice. (And it is very cookie-like.)

I might actually try baking the rest of the dough into cookies later today and see how they come out.

Bahamanian Sweet Pastry

Slightly adapted from ??

¹

Ingredients

• 1/2 c. unsalted butter, softened
• 1/2 c. lard or shortening, softened
• 2 c. sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 2 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1 Tbsp. baking powder
• 1/4 c. evaporated milk
• 3-4 c. all-purpose flour
• 3 Tbsp. water²

Directions

1. Cream the butter with the lard.
2. Beat in the sugar.
3. Beat in the eggs, one at a time.
4. Beat in the vanilla.
5. Sift in the baking powder and mix well.
6. Beat in the milk.
7. Mix in the flour until a soft, but roll-able dough forms.
8. If the dough seems too stiff, add water, 1 tsp. at a time, until consistency seems about right.
9. Divide into four equal portions, cover/wrap, and refrigerate until ready to use. One portion makes one 23cm (9") single crust pie. (Use two portions for a double crust pie.)

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¹ My mom has a Bahamanian cookbook and shared this recipe from it. I have neither the title nor the author of the book. I'll come back and add them later if I can. ^Back
2 The original recipe called for water, but I didn't use any. Even without it, the dough was still very, very soft. I actually used a full 4 c. of flour plus a generous (but unmeasured) additional quantity for dusting my work surface while I was rolling out the dough. ^Back