Walnut Pie - Never In My Life Again Am I Making Caramel From Scratch!

I had the world's best Walnut pie recently at the coffee shop of The Qutab Hotel here in New Delhi. It was just beautiful the way the caramel was so smooth and well, caramelly - there is no other way to describe caramel okay?- but still not so overpowering that you couldn't taste the nutty bitterness of the walnuts. It was perfect.

Having never made a pie ever in my entire life, I thought, you know what? Why not a walnut pie? What could go wrong? It's just pie crust, walnuts and caramel right? Right?... Wrong!

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong and more! Old Murphy was really looking down hard on me from wherever he was hiding!

First, the sugar for the caramel burned because I, who-had-never-made-caramel-in-my-life-ever thought: Puh-lease! That sugar is going to take AGES to melt. Let me go pee... Wrong decision. When I came back, not only did my kitchen resemble an industrial meat smoker but alas, my caramel had brunt to a crisp!

Round two! This time! This time, I wasnt going to made the same mistake! So I watched my caramel like a hawk watches it's prey, waiting for the right moment to swoop in for the kill. And when my sugar melted into this deep amber, almost creamy looking liquid, I was happy. Hey! The worst part was over right? Right? Wrong!

Then, it was time to add the milk to the caramel to make it toffee like. Ho Hum, what could go wrong? Could the cold cold milk turn my beautiful caramel into HARD CANDY?????? Why yes, in fact, yes it could! apparently, you cannot wait, even a second after pouring in the milk and you must instead whisk the caramel profusely WHILE stirring in the milk. WHY HADN'T ANYONE EVER MENTIONED THIS TO ME BEFORE???

So there I was, with my hard sugar candy and on top of that, the layer of milk and just when I was about to give up, I recalled this one Chopped episode where one of the chefs had faced the same problem and she just let the hard candy melt all over again over a very low flame. Could this work? Of course, I thought, if a professionally trained chef could do it, so could I right? Right? WRONG!

Because of course the milk in my caramel curdled.

Sigh.

By then, I had no patience what-so-ever. and I was giving up on my dream of re-creating that delicious walnut pie. I thought, half heartedly, lets see what we can do with this...this...thing... So, after adding the other requisite ingredients, and deciding that no, adding those things did not help at all, I sieved my caramel through a fine mesh strainer, ruining my mother's tea strainer for ever! BUT, the resultant liquid was finer and smoother than the earlier curdled crap! I mean, yes, it wasn't as smooth as I would have liked it to be but it wasn't bad AND, most importantly, it tasted great!

So phew, I was done with the caramel. The rest was quite easy really. especially with a store bought pastry dough. Here's the recipe for the caramel.

You will need:

Melt one cup of brown sugar. When it's all melted like so:

....whisk in a cup of milk. Be careful about hot sugar splatter. You do not want hot molten sugar on your skin. Trust me....I speak from experience.

...Then, off the heat, whisk in two egg yolks into the caramel. Careful. You don't want scrambled egg-y caramel! Then get it back on heat and keep whisking till it becomes a bit thick. Add in a tablespoon of flour dissolved in a tablespoon of milk and whisk the caramel till it becomes thicker. Finally, whisk in a teaspoon of vanilla and about 3 tablespoons of butter. Keep this aside to cool till we finish with our pie dough.

Now, I made my own pie dough. I mean, when you look at it, you can tell that it's home-made. It's not perfect and thus I refuse to give you the recipe for the same. You can take a peek at the dough though --Ha! Ha! Dough Though! Get it?

My Dough before I rolled it out:

My dough before I baked it. This recipe requires the crust to be baked before hand so make sure to do the same.

....

While the crust is baking in the oven, mix a cup of walnuts into the caramel. Then after the crust is baked and cooled, add in the walnut caramel mixture. And there you have it...

.... easy Walnut Pie.