Makes 8 servings
- 1 cup roughly chopped walnuts (about 4½ oz)
- 6 Tablespoons butter
- ⅓ cup white sugar
- ⅓ cup brown sugar
- 3 eggs
- ½ cup Turkey Table Syrup (or substitute corn syrup)
- 2 Tablespoons honey
- ¼ cup bourbon
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
- 1 Tablespoon flour
- 8 oz bittersweet chocolate squares, roughly chopped
- 9 inch unbaked pie shell
Special equipment
- cast iron frying pan
electric handmixer
cookie sheet or large baking pan Method
- While you’re preheating your oven to 350°, throw the walnuts into a dry frying pan over medium heat and roast. Shake the pan frequently so they don’t burn.
In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter with the sugars. Beat in the eggs until slightly frothy. You want a little fluff so that the nuts and chocolate bits dont fall to the bottom. Stir in the liquid sweetners, bourbon, and spices. Fold in the flour, nuts, and chocolate.
Pour into your pie shell, put a baking pan or cookie sheet underneath your pie in case it overflows (better burnt goo on a baking pan than all over the floor of your oven), and bake 50 minutes.
Notes
- If you substitute pecans for the walnuts, you’ve got the all the makings of a Derby Pie, but to our tastes pecans are too sweet for this pie.
Why not beat all the liquids together? We’ve found it’s difficult to get that batter fluffy enough. The science says cream the granular sugars with butter to first get air into the batter, and then the eggs. Unlike the liquid sugars, the granulated sugars have sharp edges which are necessary for forming many tiny air pockets. See McGee’s discussion for more of the science.
Suggestions
- Would semisweet chocolate morsels work? Perhaps. But mini-morsels definitely would not: they sink too easily to the bottom. Baking chips the size of half a Wilbur Bud work great.
Would this work better in a deep dish pan? It might; depending of the size of your eggs and the inaccuracy of your measurements, you may end up with more filling than fits in a regular 9 inch pie pan as we sometimes have.