I Baked 192 Lemon Bars to Create the Perfect Recipe

I take risks and I try different things all the time.

It has never gone this badly in any recipe I've ever done.

It has never gone this badly.

I spent the last two days making all these lemon bars

so that I could make this.

It takes a lot of trial and error to make a recipe worthy

of being published on Bon Appetit.

Today, I'm going to show you

how I developed my perfect lemon bar.

[upbeat orchestra music]

[tape rewinds]

From what I can tell, there are about four classic ways

to make lemon bars, and we're gonna try them all today.

First, I'm gonna make an identical crust

for all four versions,

and once we pick a technique that we like,

we can go in and finesse the flavor from there.

It's a super easy press-in shortbread crust.

It's like a shortbread cookie.

This configuration is based

on a tart crust that I've used before,

but I just wanted to use something super easy

to create a standard crust for us to start with.

We are gonna throw these guys in the oven

at 325 for about 25 minutes.

While those are in the oven,

I have three main goals for today.

One is a filling that perfectly balances sour and sweet.

Keeping a lot of that robust lemony flavor

but in a perfect balance is tough to achieve.

Second is I want a crust that stands up to the filling,

and that's important because I don't want things to fall

apart when you bite into it.

I don't want filling to squidge out.

I want everything to feel perfectly together,

and relatedly, my last goal is a clean slice.

It's an aesthetics thing.

I want it to be gorgeous.

I want it to be beautiful.

I want you to feel proud of it

to put it out on a plate for guests,

and part of that for me is really crisp angles.

Four crusts have baked.

Now I'm gonna start making the fillings,

which is where each of those four versions

are going to diverge.

First up is a cooked filling that gets chilled.

It is my go-to lemon curd recipe,

thickened a little bit with starch.

It's based on a old Epicurious lemon curd recipe.

All sorts of versions of curd

all come from like this sort of base ratio,

and I'll let it chill in the fridge for about four hours.

Second method I'm gonna try is key lime pie style,

which is sweetened, condensed milk, egg yolks,

and citrus juice.

It is a standard key lime pie filling made with lemons

instead, poured into the crust, baked, and then chill,

but I think it being milk-based and not butter-based

is going to yield like too creamy of a filling

and not as like acidic punchy.

The third method is a twice-cooked filling,

the exact same recipe as the first lemon curd I made

but without the starch, because instead of putting it

in the fridge to firm up, we're gonna bake it.

I'm excited to try this one,

because I think it might be like really firm.

The main reason why my gut disqualifies this version

is because you make the cooked curd,

you pour it into the crust, and then you bake it.

It's just fussy.

If you have to cook the thing twice,

it's gotta be really worth it to me.

The fourth method is a raw filling made

in a food processor, then baked.

This is based on a lemon tart recipe

that I developed for BA.

I think technique-wise, this one is gonna be my favorite,

because I really like the cleanliness

of everything happening in the food processor.

To me, that's really nice.

My one concern is the tart

that I've made using this technique.

It's not a lemon bar.

So I think the expectation of flavor is slightly different.

So my guess is that the filling

isn't gonna taste as lemony as I want,

and that's the one place where I think we may run

into some trouble with this one.

Okay, all four are here.

They have all cooled and been chilled.

They're very different-looking,

and I have a lot of thoughts,

and I'm scared about what I'm thinking.

This is the curd that all we did was make the curd

and throw it on there in the fridge.

It's not a lemon bar

if it doesn't have a powdered sugar top, I think.

Next one, this is our key lime pie style.

It's a little more darker yellow than our first guy.

That's a nice look.

This is number three, our twice-cooked filling.

This is where I feel a little heartbroken.

This one looks the best,

and it is the one I am most angry about,

because it takes the most effort,

and I don't want this recipe to be super effortful,

and in the break, I talked to Chris Morocco,

and he was like, All my life, I have tried to make a lemon

bar recipe that doesn't involve being twice-cooked,

and I've never succeeded.

So what that means to me is that we need to figure out

what our mission is, because if, when we eat this,

it is indeed the best, is what we're after the best

or is it the simplest?

Oh, we have to think about what our mission is,

and last one, this was the food processor.

Uh-oh, okay.

It's toasty-roasty on the edges, which is interesting,

and it's got this baked top you can see,

but the inside is quite yellow.

Now we do some analysis.

[exclaims] Okay, number one, it is delicious.

They're deeply lemony.

Crust is fine.

Crust is delightful cookie.

The top is like fully, you know, it's just curd.

I smeared it right off, which means you cannot stack them.

They probably won't sit out

at room temperature for very long.

While this was delicious, it might be just too tender

and too delicate for our purposes.

Number two, key lime pie version.

Delicious, not a lemon bar, so dairy forward,

like lemon ice cream.

The lemon is there, but it's so cloaked in this richness

of the milk, it just doesn't give me lemon bar.

Number three, twice cooked.

Those are great lemon bar.

I don't feel that these two are very different

in terms of flavor.

I think the texture is really nice,

much more set than its friend.

Okay, and this is our weirdo, food processor.

It has the firmest top, like look at that.

The top just peels off, which is crazy,

but this texture is more like a jammy spread,

and I do like that it holds up,

like you could stack these in a box,

but the flavor is much more muted.

It's like a lemon muffin.

All of these have merits in their own way.

So what we have to figure out is what is it

that we want our lemon bar to do

and then work backwards from there.

When I am developing a recipe and I don't know the answer,

I have to confront the source.

This is the first one, the curd refrigerated.

Really bright, lovely, piercing lemon quality.

There is a softness

to that set, though, It's so soft.

like they're gonna be delicate, will not travel.

This is key lime pie version.

Wow, the quality of the citrus flavor is really weird.

It's like it's almost like off.

It's so creamy, but it's like it's muted the lemon,

and it's like really dulled the edges of the lemon

Twice baked, so it's the exact same curd as this,

but minus the one teaspoon of starch.

It's a little overly sharp.

I think for a lot of people, they'd say, oh--

This is a more sweet-sour balance,

Yes, exactly.

I think like the-- which is one of our goals.

The balance tier is still optimal on the end.

[Kendra] This is the fourth one, food processor filling.

I mean visually, you've lost something.

It's not as lemony, but it's not bad,

and the set is very nice.

What if you weren't using the food processor

and you were just working it together by hand in a bowl?

Do you think that would give you enough

but without like all of that aeration?

Necessarily making it so, yeah.

This one, for flavor, is winning.

It's the best overall of what you have here.

This, to me, skin notwithstanding, very promising,

and I feel like this world

is where a lot of people want to be.

You have room, I think, to experiment like with like fat,

All the eggs. both in the form

of like, yeah, all the eggs, all of the yolk,

also your starches.

If you can kind of clean up the visual,

I think that's like, that's pretty good.

This is why we have these talks.

Thank you.

I feel ready.

I feel a direction is forming.

I'm going to attempt a whisk in a bowl,

pour it on, and bake method.

So this style but no sweetened condensed milk,

this style but no food processor

to yield something that tastes more like this.

Is it possible?

We don't know, but I'm very excited to just get one banged

out and see what it will be.

I am making the same crust as before,

but I'm reducing the dry ingredients

and the butter slightly but keeping the yolk the same.

So what I think that's going to do is create a easier dough

to work with so it'll have a little bit more moisture in it,

a little less crumbly, and a little more snap.

Now I'm gonna make two slightly different versions

of the filling.

The first one follows some of the ingredient list

of the curd, but we're not gonna cook it first on the stove.

We're just going to whisk it together in a bowl.

What we're gonna do to start us off

is give ourselves the best opportunity

for like a aerated, fluffy mixture.

So what we can do is whisk our eggs and our sugar together

to try and get some like nice, frothier texture

before we add in everything else.

While that is baking, we'll start on round two V two.

The second version, deviates from the curd slightly,

higher amount of fat, more egg yolks rather than full eggs,

and it's slight tweak on the sugar amount as well.

It's all yolks, it's all yolks.

We'll just name her all yolks.

All yolks is what happens in the key lime pie version.

So I liked that set level,

but is it that way because it's interacting

with that sweetened condensed milk?

Will I not be able to approximate that same set level

with butter and sugar?

I don't know.

So that's why we're trying it.

Food processor version had one

and a quarter cup of sugar for less eggs.

So I'm gonna go with one

and a quarter cup sugar on this one.

I'm gonna whisk it a little bit,

and I'm gonna see what happens.

Okay, and now is my moment where I think

if adding the flour is the way, and I think it is the way.

This guy is gonna go in a 325 oven.

We'll see.

I come to you a battered woman. [chuckles]

These didn't work, and that's okay.

We had no idea what would happen and this is what happened.

This sort of very gooey, very browned thing.

[whimsical orchestra music]

Look, this skin that just fully comes off, ew.

[skin plops] Okay, so this was our attempt

to make a non-pre-cooked version with a whisk

and no sweetened condensed milk,

and we're learning there's a reason why

such a lemon bar has never been published.

Delightful, it looks a mess,

as they say on Great British Baking Show.

That's not how it should go.

This is the all yolk version.

She did not work. [playful orchestra music]

I don't even think.

Like I don't,

that's not,

this isn't food.

[Producer] What is that on top?

What is that on top?

Great [beep] question.

What's crazy is that is the crust right underneath.

This is the crust, because all of the filling

has gone to the sides.

Everyone watching this is gonna be like,

how did she get this job?

Why does she get to work at Bon Appetit

if this is what she does?

It's a great question.

I'm trying my best.

Here's the plan moving forward, tomorrow off camera,

I'm gonna make a bunch of crusts,

because I wanna be able to come in tomorrow morning

and hit the ground running, because we know the crust works,

and instead, we're just gonna do lots of types of filling.

I'm gonna do some reading tonight.

I'm gonna do some research.

It's gonna be great.

Hello, it is day two, and I return a changed woman.

I did some reading last night.

When a lemon bar gets that skin on top,

it is the result of air bubbles from the eggs

escaping out the top as it bakes.

So when I was like, we have to whip it a bunch

to get air into it, that was wrong.

That was the opposite of what we needed to do.

Basically, I have two trials on deck.

I wanna do one that uses milk,

give it that sweetened condensed milk feel,

and I wanna do one that uses part powdered sugar

in addition to the granulated sugar.

I'm gonna start with the version where we try adding milk.

It's going to include sugar with the zest massaged in.

I do think that's gonna help us bump up our lemon flavor

without having to add any extra juice, some eggs,

some flour, lemon juice, the milk taking the place

of the butter as a dairy component.

That's gonna balance out in terms of the amount

of fat we need and a little bit of salt.

So it's pretty simple and paired back,

but I think it's gonna work.

Next one is gonna be our powdered sugar version.

The only liquid will be the eggs and the lemon juice.

So that makes me feel like it can have even more eggs.

So we're gonna get all of that liquid,

that added moisture that we need,

plus a little extra richness from an extra yolk.

So I think we might go five eggs, crazy.

The powdered sugar, it's doing double duty.

Number one, it's in our crust already.

So it's not a new added ingredient,

which I love from a development perspective,

and because it contains starch,

I'm hoping that it will do some

of my stabilizing work for me.

I have one clump of powdered sugar

in here that I'm gonna get out.

I'm gonna massage that clump out, and two thirds, our flour.

I gotta say I don't think this order was right,

because I don't like adding the flour at the end like this,

because it means I have to whisk harder

than I would like to fully incorporate.

I don't like the way it's looking.

I wanna do it again.

I'm worried that there's like little fleck

of stuff, not fully incorporated flour,

and I wanna change the order that we mix.

[upbeat jazz music] So I'm gonna do that.

Eggs, granulated sugar, this time,

I'm sifting the powdered sugar to avoid any of those clumps.

We're gonna do four tablespoons of flour sifted in.

All right, looking much better than our first batch.

Now this version, I'm just gonna pour over our crust,

and then we'll bake this one off too.

Okay, I'm really excited.

These two look really nice.

We've got really nice yellow brightness,

no crazy, hazy, goopy topping, which is awesome,

a little bit of bubbling, which I think we can address

by maybe knocking our pans the next time,

which is a way that people can release bubbles

out the top before you bake.

So let's start with our version with milk.

Oh yeah.

To me, that looks really nice.

If we go with this direction,

there are some slight tweaks in texture.

I think we went four tablespoons of flour, quarter cup,

and I think we can go down to three,

because it's very well set,

but there's a little bit of that mouth feel

of thickness and pastiness, but the flavor is really nice.

In general, the cuts have been really clean.

The filling doesn't squidge out anywhere, which is great.

So now we're gonna try this powdered sugar version.

Really nice, good color again.

It's so interesting.

The filling was so thin, it was so viscous,

it flooded around the crust.

So you can see there's a layer of the filling that seeped

underneath the crust here in the corner.

The flavor is nice.

The absence of the milk makes it almost too lemon-forward.

The powdered sugar purported to bring a setness,

because of the starch, to the mixture,

but it did not do that.

This is not the way to go,

and I wanna stick with the milk version.

This, I think, is near perfect.

It's really close.

It's a tiny bit thicker of a filling than I want it to be.

I think reducing the flour ever so slightly

and tweaking the flavors by maybe adding a little bit

of preserved lemon is all that this needs to totally shine.

Chris isn't in today, and when that happens,

Hana is the one who makes the final call.

Katie, oh my gosh. Okay, so.

So sunny. So sunny.

Ooh, it's really nice.

It's well-rounded in it's tartness.

It's not just so sharp that you get tangy moments.

It's not like reading dairy, but it's reading just round.

Texture of the lemon bar is great.

I don't know that I want preserved lemon.

Really? Preserved lemon really wants

to make itself known, and this is so nice and well-rounded.

If you add preserved lemon, I might up the sugar a bit,

because it's already just sweet enough, which is nice,

but I wouldn't mind even like a touch more.

The look is great.

Let's go harder on the crust, and by harder,

I just mean longer time in the--

Oven, yeah. In the oven.

I think we're gonna nail it at the next one,

I really do. Yes, no, I'm so excited.

My feeling was that the filling felt

a little bit too thick.

Hana did not feel that way

and liked the consistency of the filling.

I think that that means I can reduce the amount

of flour by less than what I thought.

I'm gonna make two new crusts that are the same as before

but with slightly longer cook time

so that they're a little bit crisper

and can stand up to the filling.

Now I'm gonna make my two fillings.

First up is what we're calling milk 2.0.

Compared to the first milk version,

the changes to this one are one tablespoon less flour

to just get rid of that very subtle sort of pasty note

and one tablespoon added of powdered sugar,

drop it ever so gently like this, and that helps pop any

of those little bubbles that are left.

Now we're gonna make our final filling,

which is just a vanity project at this point.

I wanna try one with preserved lemon just to see.

Preserved lemon is lemons that are cured in salt.

So it's extremely potent, extremely salty.

It's kind of wild and so powerful.

Here they are, our two milked versions.

We're gonna start with preserved lemon

since that one is a wild card.

Alright, we got a little bit of crackage.

Yeah, this is very, very tender.

[groans] A lot of filling squidging.

So this is the cookie and the filling is on the bottom.

It's upside down.

This happens.

When your filling is overly runny,

it runs to the edges of your sheet pan

and then fills in underneath the crust.

Oh, what a heartbreak.

All right, the flavor, I think,

wasn't gonna be the winner anyway.

It's not lemony enough.

Yeah, it's just really, really mild.

So here is the sinking feeling I'm having in my gut.

That adjustment that I made

where I reduced the flour by one tablespoon

and then I added one tablespoon powdered sugar,

was that my detriment?

Did it need all four tablespoons of flour

and three tablespoons is not gonna be it? [sighs]

Wow, I'm really nervous now. [playful orchestra music]

I think we'll be okay, but I don't know.

I'm scared.

I think it happened here too.

Oh, you can see it's inverted, fully upside down.

[sighs] This is gonna be so depressing this episode,

Kendra fails at making lemon bars for two full days.

All right, so here's the thing, it tastes great.

We need all of that flour.

We're gonna take the powdered sugar back out.

We're gonna adjust the sugar and the salt content,

and that's gonna be it.

All right, we're doing it one more time.

We upped the salt in the crust from the last time,

and I don't think it was enough.

So we're gonna do slightly more salt.

So now I'm making my filling.

We're doing the full four tablespoons of flour,

and we're increasing the granulated sugar,

slightly more sweetness so that

that balances a little better.

We'll check on that in 20 minutes.

Okay, we are having a day.

I opened up the oven at our time.

It was soup.

It was totally sloshy liquid.

The gas went out, the ovens got [beep] up.

It was not the right temperature anymore.

So we cranked it and got it to set,

and it looks honestly fine but not perfect,

because it had this weird blip

of not the right temperature in the middle.

I talked to Hana about it,

and she thinks that the oven being screwed up

is also to blame for our earlier mishaps,

the upside down lemon bars.

She was like, There's no way that reducing

by one tablespoon of flour would've created that,

and the problem was the oven.

This is not the one,

because when the temperatures go all crazy,

that's not a recipe you can account for, you know?

We are actually gonna revisit milk version two.

We're gonna try it again, less the powdered sugar, I think,

and just that three tablespoons of flour,

slightly saltier crust, and I think with a real oven

that is the right temperature,

we're gonna use our best oven, which is back there,

we're gonna get our lemon bar today,

I really think we will.

I'm going to very quickly put that together,

get it in the oven, and I'll be back here

as soon as it's done.

[upbeat jazz music]

She baked, she chilled, and here she is.

My heart is racing.

Right off the bat, I'm feeling super good,

because the reason why this was so awesome to me

when I pulled it out of the oven is that

that one fewer tablespoon of flour, visually even,

made such a difference.

It is set, but it is less firm,

and that was exactly what I was going for,

and I can see it in the texture that that's the case,

and I am flooded with relief about that.

These are so nice.

I am delighted to report it was an oven issue.

The pastiness is gone.

I was like, do I believe that?

I haven't put it in my mouth yet,

and then I did, and I believe it.

It not only delivers on that sour sweet,

the ratio crust to filling is great,

the cuts are really nice,

and the ingredients list is eight ingredients long,

and it's really quick to make.

The roller coaster you've been on today,

I really have been.

oh my gosh.

First of all, what a thing of beauty.

Really nice. Yeah.

With here. Oh, that's like three

to one ratio right there.

Look at her jiggle.

Oh my god.

I love how rounded the lemon flavor is,

but you still get the punchy tart

that you want out of a lemon bar.

The crust is fantastic.

I increased the cook time on the crust.

Yeah, the added salt, it's not reading salty.

It's just reading more delicious.

I mean, this is exactly what you want out of a lemon bar.

Eight ingredients.

That's amazing, but it has like a touch of creaminess,

which I love.

The milk. Yes.

It's the milk.

It's crazy, and that's what makes it different

from other lemon bars we have on the site already.

We don't make a curd.

We just whisk a mixture together that includes milk,

pour it on the precooked crust, and bake it off.

It is phenomenal. [upbeat jazz music]

This is my perfect lemon bar for a few reasons.

I think the flavor is perfectly balanced

between sour and sweet, and to achieve that,

I did not have to work that hard.

If you wanna make this recipe, and I really hope you do,

please visit bonappetit.com or the Epicurious app.

The link is in the description below,

and you too can have the literal fruits of my literal labor.