Old-fashioned Pecan Pie

 

Prep Time: 0 Minutes Cook Time: 60 Minutes

Ready In: 60 Minutes Servings: 10

the pecan pies of today bare little resemblance to their 19th-century inspiration. could we recreate a traditional pecan pie without using modern day, processed corn syrup here’s what we discovered

test kitchen discoveries

many traditional syrups (cane, sorghum) produced a great pie, but we had to mail away for them. in the end, combining maple syrup with brown sugar and molasses replicated the old-fashioned versions perfectly.

start the pie at 450 degrees and then drop down the temperature to 325 degrees to ensure the bottom crust is crisp and golden brown.

if you don’t let your pie completely cool, the filling won’t firm to the proper consistency and the pie won’t slice nicely.

a last-minute addition of cream yielded a welcome custardy transformation to the filling. this also made the filling looser; a problem easily solved by adding extra egg yolks.

toasting the nuts before they went into the pie gave them enough crunch and flavor to hold their own in the filling.

move over, karo

before cloying karo syrup monopolized the market, pies were made with many other, less processed types of syrup, including sorghum (made from a cereal grass) and cane (made from the boiled-down juice of the sugarcane plant). these syrups still exist, and you can mail-order them, but otherwise you’ll probably need to travel to places like louisiana or kentucky to find them. we tasted a range of such syrups, including steen’s 100% pure cane syrup and townsend’s sweet sorghum, then tried to duplicate their complex flavors from products we could buy at the supermarket. in the end, a combination of three ordinary sweeteners created an old-fashioned flavor that easily bested karo.