Coconut Cream Pie

Our best coconut cream pie recipe is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser with a rich but airy filling and flaky, buttery crust. It delivers concentrated coconut flavor and ethereal texture and can close out your next summer barbecue just as perfectly as your annual Thanksgiving dinner. Truly, it is destined to become everyone’s new favorite pie.

Because the creamy coconut filling doesn’t go in the oven, it’s essential to blind-bake the crust—something you can do a day in advance if you like. We like a flaky, buttery homemade pie crust recipe here, but you could swap in a graham cracker crust if preferred; or make mini tart shells and fill them with dollops of the finished custard for individual plated desserts or bake sale treats. Any way you go, bake the crust(s)—yes, even the graham one—until golden brown and crisp.

For a nutty, nuanced coconut flavor, we toast coconut flakes in the oven before steeping a portion of them in milk. If you can’t find flaked coconut at your local grocery store, buy it online or swap in an equal weight of shredded coconut—not sweetened coconut, which would make this pie too cloying. We combine the toasted coconut milk with creamy, cooling canned coconut milk to form the base of the custard filling, but we don’t call it a day there. Once cooled, we fold whipped cream into the custard to make this a proper coconut cream pie, rather than a coconut custard pie simply topped with sweetened whipped cream. Garnish with the remaining toasty coconut flakes for a dessert that looks just as dreamy as it tastes.