Before Making Ina Garten's Key Lime Pie, Make Sure You Have The Right Equipment

Classic key lime pie is deliciously easy to make. There's no pie crust to prep, chill, or blind bake, and no fruit filling to cook down. Instead, graham cracker crumbs (with the help of butter) are pressed into your pie pan for the perfect cookie crust and egg yolks, sugar, sweetened condensed milk, lime juice, and zest are whipped together for a no-fuss filling.

In Ina Garten's recipe, the cookbook author and East Hampton chef follows the traditional flavors of key lime pie, but with a few twists on the technique. First, she asks you to bring out your heavy equipment: an electric mixer with a paddle attachment to beat the egg yolks with sugar for at least five minutes. Garten suggests waiting until the mixture is thick before adding any of the other filling ingredients. If you don't have a mixer with a paddle attachment on hand, you might want to try another chef's recipe as you'll be whipping air into your eggs by hand for ages. Another key difference in her recipe? Garten doesn't cook her egg and filling mixture at all. So, if you'd rather not eat raw egg yolks, pick up a carton of pasteurized eggs.

With a relatively simple recipe that mixes up quickly, there's lots of room to experiment on the classic key lime pie. Try adding one of these secret ingredients: yogurt, milk powder, or white chocolate. By swapping some of the sweetened condensed milk for plain yogurt, you'll create a slightly tangier key lime pie (sour cream would also work well in small increments). Just be sure not to prep the pie filling too far in advance.

Adding milk powder to the graham cracker crust also helps to round out the crust's sweet flavor without changing the texture. With white chocolate, Milk Bar founder Christina Tosi has an even more radical idea — painting the inside of the crust with a thin layer of white chocolate. The white chocolate is both a cooling flavor that complements the citrus of your pie, and a support for your crust's structural integrity so you can cut perfect slices. As a final touch, steal Publix's pie crust idea by dusting the top of your pie with slightly toasted, slivered almonds before serving.