Add This Canned Ingredient To Your Pie Filling For Double The Sweetness

A pie is only ever as good as its filling. Mess up this important part, and you'll end up with a subpar dessert that takes forever to finish. Making pie filling, of course, is quite an intricate art. You've got to calibrate the ingredients just right, ensure the texture is both spoonable and jiggly thick. And the flavor? It needs to do more than just exist — it needs to excite and delight and keep everyone coming back for more. Even when you're using canned pie filling, there's still room for improvement. Not to worry, as the secret to getting all of this right can be quite simple. It's probably sitting in your pantry already, just hiding in a humble can of sweetened condensed milk.

This one-ingredient upgrade does it all. Amongst fruit jam, warm spices, buttery custard, and other pie filling essentials, its ribbons of sweetness tie everything together. Creamy and rich, it softens out mismatched flavors that clash with one another or simply provides a base for various ingredients to come together. Your pie will not only be sweeter than before, often with an extra caramelized edge, but also leave your taste buds humming with a soothing harmony.

Swirling around in pie fillings, condensed milk also doubles as a texture enhancer. Its reduced water content (often by around 60%) and high level of sugar make it extremely silky and concentrated. As a result, it thickens the pie filling with a smoothness that doesn't weigh the whole thing down.

The pie world is extremely vast and diverse, and condensed milk has a way of fitting right into a huge part of it. You will most likely find it in a sweet and tart key lime pie, where its sweetness flawlessly uplifts the zesty lime, or similarly, a lemon pie dotted with meringue cream. And did you know that condensed milk is also the secret ingredient for creamy cherry pie filling? It both thickens and sweetens the filling, providing the perfect base for the cherry jam to shine. Even in a Dutch apple pie, where creamy ingredients aren't usually required, condensed milk can still play a role in enriching the flavors. Going beyond the fruit realm, condensed milk can also elevate a decadent chocolate pie, or one imbued with the nutty wonders of peanut butter.

A can (often around 14 ounces) of condensed milk is typically enough for a 9-inch pie. The specifics vary between recipes and preferences; however, keep in mind that sweetened condensed milk, as the name suggests, is already quite sweet. With this addition, you might want to keep the sugar and any other sweet or rich ingredients to a minimum. As for the execution, it's as straightforward as can be. Whisk it with the rest of the filling's ingredients, such as egg yolk, cream-based ingredients like cream cheese or heavy cream, and citrus juice (if the recipe calls for it) until you have a smooth and thick pie filling.