Home >  Lifestyle >  Food

Thursday, May 08, 2003

By Suzanne Martinson, Food Editor, Post-Gazette

LIHUE, Kauai -- It was the last day of our two-week Hawaiian vacation, but what, me worry? We were enjoying a final fix of Lilikoi Pie before exiting Paradise for Pittsburgh.

	The secret to Lilikoi Pie is passion fruit juice concentrate, which can be hard to find but is worth the hunt. (Jeannette Blosel, Post-Gazette)

A graham cracker crust, an airy filling, roofed in whipped topping -- satisfying but not over the top after a filling bowl of saimen noodles.

We've become passionate about passion fruit. In Hawai'i it's known as lilikoi. It's a small, burgundy fruit with golden filling -- you can spit out the seeds or crunch away. The smell is intoxicating.

More than a year had passed since our week on Kauai, and from that time to this my husband, Ace, and I fantasized about Lilikoi Pie. In March we got a chance at another precious piece on a six-hour stop on the Garden Island during our family cruise of the Hawaiian Islands. This time the visit to Hamura Noodle Shop was a show-and-tell for my brother, Jon, and his bride, Martha.

One of the joys -- and banes -- of travel is the hunger a person feels for a delicious new food. This spring we became obsessed with Lilikoi Pie all over again. It hit as soon as we left the noodle shop.

I gave myself a deadline: Mother's Day. I would give Mom that taste of the tropics we had so enjoyed on the cruise, which had included her and her three children and their spouses.

Perhaps you have to be there to re-create the true thing, but I got a hint from the waitress the first time I ever tasted this lovely, light pie.

I brazenly asked her for the recipe. She claimed it was Saturday and the pie baker was off.

"Maybe it's a secret recipe," I suggested.

She nodded, a little grin slipping out.

"What is the secret?" I boldly asked.

"Lilikoi concentrate," I think she said under her breath.

The place has all the ambience of a greasy spoon and it was jammed with families, teen sweethearts, every kind of Island culture -- all in search of the ultimate bowl of homemade noodles. And save room for the Lilikoi Pie.

At a short stop at the museum in Lihue, a friendly clerk in the gift shop perused the Hawaiian cookbooks with me, looking for a recipe. We found a lilikoi something, but it was categorized as a "dessert," not a pie. I figured it might do in a pinch, so I bought the book.

Home, Ace entered the nether world of Internet recipes (you don't know if anybody's tested them or even tasted them) and printed out another possibility.

Now I had to locate lilikoi. It's embarrassing to admit this, but a bottle of passion fruit juice had languished on the bottom shelf in our refrigerator door, until I tossed it. But that was BLP -- (Before Lilikoi Pie). What is the shelf live of passion "nectar," as it was called?

At the supermarket, Ace searched for canned, he searched for frozen, he searched for fresh. He searched with a passion. We eventually located some passion juice at McGinnis Sisters in Monroeville. However, it came from Africa, not Hawaii. Both passionate places. (Last week McGinnis had passion fruit nectar that was labeled "Product of Belgium.")

We thought we'd tough it out.

Then our friend Linda Wilson of the Kauai condo reported she may have seen passion fruit juice in the supermarket freezer case in Washington State, but we're a long way from the Pacific Northwest. But then one day -- it's a miracle! --I found some in the last slot of the frozen juice case at Giant Eagle at McIntyre Square, Ross. The frozen passion fruit drink concentrate, made by Welch's, is not 100 percent lilikoi, but it looked good. Smelled right, too.

My passion for lilikoi has been fulfilled, and you can put some passion in your Mother's Day desserts.

Passionate experiment

We believe many mothers might enjoy the lightness of lilikoi.

Lilikoi is a small burgundy fruit with a golden filling and intoxicating smell. (Jeanette Blosel, Post-Gazette)

When it came to making our passion fruit desserts, we experimented with a couple of different kinds of lilikoi.

For the pie that we believe is closest to the one we ate on Kauai, we used Welch's concentrate, but we used it full-strength, rather than reconstituting it with water. We figured the pie at Hamura's in Kauai was topped with nondairy whipped topping (a better shelf life), but we used real whipped cream. We had been experimenting with whipped cream stabilized with gelatin and we used this recipe, which will hold up 24 hours. We found the Lilikoi Chiffon Pie recipe on allrecipes.com.

Although the recipe for Lilikoi Pistachio Pie -- it is made in a 9-by-13 inch pan rather than a pie plate -- called for fresh juice, we took the easy way out and did not squeeze the juice ourselves. We used frozen concentrate, which we reconstituted with water, as the container suggested. This is a time-consuming dessert with three layers, a crust and a topping but well worth the effort. It would be appropriate if you are expecting more than six people for Mother's Day. Be sure to make sure your pan is deep enough -- if we had used our glass 9-by-13, it would have overflowed. The recipe, which is from "Hawai'i's Best Local Desserts," serves 16 to 20.

Light Lilikoi Cheesecake is wonderful. As the recipe directed we used frozen lilikoi drink concentrate. It came from "Maui Cooks Again."

Related Recipes:

Lilikoi Pistachio Pie
Luscious Lilikoi Chiffon Pie
Light Lilikoi Cheesecake