I’ve enjoyed the odd pecan pie and I’m having a stressful week:
pastry cooking + stress = swearing and perspective.
I use pastry cooking the same way someone athletically inclined may use a punching bag, suddenly instead of worrying about how much you fucked up the interview for your dream job – you’re yelling at your biscuit crust because it won’t combine. Plus, at the end of it all you potentially have a wondrous sugary plate of stress relief to ingest.
After re-watching the scene of True Blood where Sookie Stackhouse sits sobbing while wolfing down her dead grandmother’s pecan pie – I decided it was an appropriate choice.
She really likes that pie.
I combined a couple of recipes for this one and it turned out wonderfully. The golden layer on the top there is a honeycomb-ish crust encasing the pecans, which sits on top of a creamy caramel layer. In the end, it was pretty easy and if you get all the right ingredients, you should be fine.
Crust
- 2/3 cup pecan halves
- 1 1/2 cups plain flour
- 110g chilled butter, cubed
- Pinch of salt
- 1/4 cup cold water
Filling
- 1 1/2 cups toasted pecan halves
- 80g butter
- 1 cup packed brown sugar
- 1/4 cup white sugar
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 3 eggs
- 1/2 cup light corn syrup
- 2 teaspoons vanilla essence
Begin by preheating your oven to 180°C and spread all your pecans for the recipe in one layer on an oven tray. Keep an eye on them and give them a shake at around 2 minutes. Once they’re fragrant and sizzling, remove them and allow to cool slightly.
Take 2/3 of a cup and grind them in a blender or food processor. If you have a food processor, you can simply add the butter, salt and flour, pulse together – then add the cold water and pulse until it forms a ball. I only had a blender, so I combined the flour, salt, butter and ground pecans in a bowl, combining into a crumb consistency by hand. I then added the water, stirred it together and kneaded it a little by hand to get it to the right consistency. I had to add a little more water, but I think I’d been generous with the pecans.
Form the dough into a ball, wrap in cling film and place in the fridge for 30 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 200°C. Flour a surface and roll out your dough the best you can into a quarter inch thick round. The dough is very crumbly though and hard to keep together, just grab pieces of it and push it into a medium sized pie/tart tin until it evenly covers the base and sizes without any holes. Prick the pastry several times with a fork to prevent it from rising and place in the oven for 15 minutes, watching that it doesn’t brown too much (mine stayed pretty much speckled white for the entire cooking process). When you remove it from the oven, reduce the temperature to 150°C
While the tin is in the oven, melt the butter for the filling in a medium saucepan and remove from the heat. Using a whisk, combine the butter with the salt and sugars (not the syrup yet) until it forms an even paste. Add one egg at a time, whisking it together. Add the vanilla and corn syrup (tricky, you may need several spoons) and continue to whisk until it’s all combined.
Return the saucepan to a low heat and continue whisking constantly to avoid the eggs scrambling at the bottom of the pan. After about 5 minutes, the mixture should become hot and glossy at which point you remove it from the heat. If you notice any bits of egg floating around, you can strain the mixture into a bowl before stirring in the rest of the pecans.
Place the hot crust on a flat, level surface and pour the filling in until it’s just full. Place in the oven for 45-50 minutes.
During the cooking process, the filling will rise – though once cooled, it fill flatten again so don’t let it worry you. In my opinion, it tastes best after a night in the fridge – though you can enjoy it warm after an hour of cooling.
Enjoy!
