All the right ingredients

Today, I would like to stress the importance of knowing your stuff in the kitchen.  Namely, I’d like to stress how you should have everything on your ingredients list in your kitchen.

Last week, I ran into a bit of a dilemma when making dinner with my boyfriend.
Originally I had wanted to make flan for dessert, but the recipe on the necessary can of condensed milk told us that it would take four hours for the flan to set. We still wanted dessert, but time was limited.

We settled on making a really quick key lime pie from ready-made graham cracker crust and key lime filling — simple enough. We could just make the pie and refrigerate it or freeze it, and it would be done right after finishing dinner.

But my boyfriend asked if we could do some kind of topping on it. I’ve never been a big fan of whipped cream on pie, so I offered to literally whip up a meringue.

If you’ve never made meringues or don’t know how to make them, they’re fairly simple. Essentially, you add sugar to egg whites and whip them until the mixture is so full of air that the mix creates soft peaks.

When we got back, I started working on the meringue, using an online recipe. It was the first one to come up and looked simple enough. It just told me to add a few tablespoons of sugar to two egg whites and throw in vanilla for flavoring. 

I ran into the problem of not having an egg-beater, meaning I had to whip the mix by hand. I didn’t mind this at first, since I followed directions and everything seemed to be going well. After the mixture turned foamy, I added the sugar and continued to beat the mix, like the recipe said.

I was to keep mixing until the mixture created soft peaks, meaning it was stiffer and would make the large puffs of meringue. I kept whipping my egg whites for what felt like an eternity. As my wrists got sore from the work, my boyfriend took over for me, but nothing seemed to be working.

I re-read the recipe a few times, looking to make sure I didn’t miss any directions or the time necessary to create the meringue. According to the recipe I hadn’t done anything wrong, but someone who commented on the recipe mentioned how she added cream of tartar to hers to help.

Uh-oh.

I recalled having cream of tartar in my kitchen at home and rarely using it, but I knew it was a necessary and important baking ingredient. I soon started looking up more meringue recipes, finding that the majority of them called for some small amount of cream of tartar.

I began to panic. We didn’t buy any cream of tartar at the store, nor did the boyfriend keep any at the apartment because there really wasn’t any need for it. I continued to whip my egg whites until I gave up and then carefully poured the mixture on top of the pre-made pie to bake.

Fortunately it did not take long for the meringue to bake and become a beautiful golden brown. However, the filling was all messy and wobbly because it had been baked. Even throwing the pie in the freezer didn’t help the pie reset itself to its normal state.

Here’s the kicker — with all the time spent on the meringue and setting the pie in the freezer, we could have spent just as much time making the flan we originally considered making. And to think, this could have been avoided with a little bit of cream of tartar and common sense.

So the moral of this story is: remember to read your recipes and ingredient lists before you decide on a whim to make dessert. You never know what magical, necessary baking ingredient you may need.