Pecan Pie for Butterfly
The following recipe is from John Thornes book Outlaw Cook and is preceded by several pages on his search for the perfect pecan pie. He concluded that because the recipe is so simple it is amenable to infinite variation and all you can do is hone it to your own palate. He also spent a great deal of time and energy researching pre-corn syrup sugars, which 19th century recipes would have used, which is how he ended up using golden syrup.
Fine-tuning your pecan pie:
A little cream (about 1/4 to 1/2 cup) mixed into a pecan pie filling before baking gives it a richer, lighter texture.
For a sweeter, lighter pie: add more sugar and use fewer pecans; for a denser, less sweet pie: add more pecans and use less sugar.
The buttery flavour and the lard-induced flakiness of a butter and lard crust make it the perfect one for a perfect pecan pie. And a Southern pecan pie authority I know suggests that you roll out the dough a little thicker than usual; a thick, richly shortened crust provides an appetizing balance to the sweetness of the filling.
MY PECAN PIE
1 well-packed cup full-flavoured brown sugar
Scant 2/3 cup golden syrup
2 T dark rum
4 T butter
3 eggs
1/4 t salt
2 cups broken pecan meats
9-inch unbaked pie shell
Preheat oven to 350F. In a large saucepan, heat the brown sugar, golden syrup and butter to the boiling point. Stirring constantly and scraping back any foam that clings to the side of the pan, let this mixture boil for about 1 minute. Remove from the heat and let cool while, in a separate bowl, you beat the eggs until creamy.
When the boiled syrup has cooled, beat in the eggs, salt and pecans. Pour into the unbaked pie shell and bake for about 50 minutes.
Being Bermudian I use Goslings black seal rum, which is pretty potent, but any good dark rum will do. For the brown sugar I like muscovado, but not sure if you can find that where you live.
Athena
Sep 27, 2005 10:10AM
Thorne's recipe is excellent. For the brown sugar I use a mix of palm sugar (gula jawa-Jakarta) and Billington's.
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Thanks so much! I can't wait to try this.
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Just wanted to say that I made this pie this weekend and it turned out really well. I couldn't find muscovado sugar, but I went to a Mexican grocery and got some piloncillo and used that. My rum was a 20 year Dominican rum. Because I wanted a denser pie, I used closer to 2.75 cups of pecans and cut the sugar to a scant well-packed cup. I cheated shamelessly and used a store-bought crust made with ww flour and oil. (I know, I know, but it was leftover in the freezer.)
I think if I had used a homemade butter crust this would have been the best pecan pie I've ever had-- as it was it was head and shoulders above most pecan pies, which tend to be all sugar sweetness and not enough pecan. The syrup in this recipe is wonderfully complex.
Thanks for the recipe!
P.S. The recipe doesn't say when to add the rum, so I added it to the syrup before boiling. There are also no guidelines for telling when the pie is done cooking. I treated it like a pumpkin pie, meaning I took it out when the filling in the very center was still a little jiggly. Residual heat finished it off.
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Just checked the recipe again, yes the rum goes in with the syrup, butter and brown sugar at the beginning. It's done when a skewer comes out clean. Sorry about that!
Thorne's thoughts on pastry: a butter and lard crust rolled out thicker than usual is the perfect complement. I've never attempted that though. I have used Crisco and damn the trans fats!
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