Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–so glad you’re here!
Folks–here’s the bottom line: a pecan pie should be just that: a pecan pie. If you want a chocolate pie, make a chocolate pie. The two do not belong together in one pie–they just don’t.
I am not a chocoholic. There. I said it and I’m not sorry. It’s not that I don’t like chocolate, because I do. But I like other sweets, too, and I’m just as likely to order an apple tart or a lemon or strawberry cake as I am to order a chocolate torte. I do, however, have many people in my life who are hard core chocoholics who love their chocolate and insist that any dessert is improved with a hit of chocolate–including pecan pie.
I am a Southern girl and I was raised on pecan pie. I love pecan pie because it is the perfect combination of elegant melting caramel creamy custard and nuts. Some folks are turned off by it because too many pecan pies do not contain enough salt to cut through the sweet of the brown sugar and corn syrup. But when made properly, there really is nothing better. This recipe for pecan pie, that I have cultivated over the years, hits all the right marks:
So why would I ever want to add chocolate to something so very perfect? I have resisted for…my whole life. But today, I decided to do a test to see if I could make a chocolate-pecan pie that could hold up to my standards. This recipe for dark chocolate-pecan pie with bourbon and sea salt is what I came up with.
My issue with chocolate-pecan pies (or Winner’s Circle Pie), is that they always have so much chocolate in them that they become an unrecognizable mess of nothing but gooey, melted globs of chocolate, caramel custard and nuts. And when I taste them, I get nothing but a clot of gooshy chocolate and I’m done eating them after a bite or two because they’re just too rich, too cloying and just…too…much.
So, I asked myself how to approach this conundrum. I started with the premise that the pie had to be basically my pecan pie with some chocolate added. But how much chocolate, and what kind? Well–how much was both an easy answer and a hard one: I knew I would cut back dramatically on the amount of chocolate, but I still wanted to be able to tell there was chocolate in there. I decided the best bang for the buck was going to be to go for the best-quality, darkest chocolate I could reasonably put into the pie. Ghirardelli is our local San Francisco, venerable chocolatier and I found these at my local grocery store:
I reasoned that the darker the chocolate, the less I’d have to use to get the chocolate flavor in the pie, without adding an overwhelming hit of sweetness to an already sweet pie and without sacrificing the overall texture and mouthfeel of the pecan pie.
Next, I thought about how the amount of salt in my pecan pie is the key to cutting that sweetness and making more of a salted caramel flavor profile, and how there are a lot of chocolate candies out there that feature a sprinkle of sea salt. I decided to add a dusting of sea salt to the pie before serving.
And finally, I thought about the Winner’s Circle pies that I have had, which include bourbon as a flavoring, either with or without vanilla. Since my pie includes vanilla, I decided to include bourbon in addition to vanilla in hopes that it would further cut some of the “cloy” factor.
Every recipe for chocolate-pecan pie/Winner’s Circle pie I have found calls for 1 cup of chocolate and 1 cup of pecans. I cut back to the equivalent of 1/3 cup of chocolate for one test pie and to about 1/5 cup for the other one:
Next, and critically, I think, I topped the pies with real whipped cream and added a hit of vanilla and a hit of bourbon in addition to just a hint of sugar. Please, please, please don’t use the stuff that squirts out of a can–it’s just nothing short of gross. It deflates almost immediately upon hitting the air and is so, so sweet, it’s like main-lining soupy canned frosting. Whipping up real cream takes minutes and tastes…heavenly–and it will make such a difference to any nut-based pie like pecan because the cool, rich, basically unsweetened, real whipped cream will act as a counterpoint to the sweet richness of the pie.
So I made the test pies and they were lovely:
And Mr. Soup and I tasted them:
Everything I did to cut having the chocolate overwhelm the pecan pie flavors helped: dark chocolate gave a hit of chocolate, even in the pie with very little chocolate; dramatically decreasing the amount of chocolate pretty much took care of the gooshy clot of chocolate texture; and the sprinkle of sea salt over top of the pie and hit of bourbon, as well as the real whipped cream, helped to cut the “cloy-factor.” The pie with the least amount of dark chocolate chips was by far and away the pie we preferred.
But…
None of those fixes helped enough. I was still left with the overwhelming taste of chocolate in my mouth. The saving grace of the lightly-chocolated pie was that I still was able to get some mouthfuls of the pie that were only pecan pie, and at that point, what’s the point?
I am publishing the recipe for chocolate-pecan pie with only 1/5 of a cup of chocolate in it as a concession to those who prefer this pie.
But folks–a pecan pie should be just that: a pecan pie. If you want a chocolate pie, make a chocolate pie. The two do not belong together in one pie–they just don’t.
That’s it for now–tune in next week when I will feature recipes for Thanksgiving favorites and maybe a new one or two along the way–until then,
Peace, love and good, unadulterated pecan pie,
Keri
