(Bourbon Maple) Pecan Pie

From the @whiskey_CA_mmelier Collaboration Dinner

This is the dessert for the Whiskey Pairing Dinner generously provided by The Piemaker. I’ve never been a huge pecan pie fan (nor was I a big Key Lime Pie fan) until The Piemaker came into my life. This pecan pie is as ‘from scratch’ as it comes, with hints of bourbon and maple folded into the filling, served with a luxurious maple cinnamon cream. This is a decadent dessert – decadent is an understatement. But if you’re looking to level up your Holiday meal game, this is the place to start. We definitely felt the need to eat one and a half slices….. Pairing. For dessert, @whiskey_CA_mmelier wanted a really luxurious and unique bourbon to complement the salty pecans, salty crust, and sweet filling. We narrowed it down to two, both from Calumet Farm. The 15 year was treating us all well but the general consensus ended up being the Small Batch.

🥧

what you need

Dough

**this is the Serious Eats pie dough recipe and we will be using it again

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour

2 tablespoons of sugar

1 teaspoon of salt

2 1/2 sticks salted butter, cut into pats

6 tablespoons (ish) ice cold water

Filling

3/4 cup granulated sugar

1/4 cup maple syrup

1 cup light corn syrup

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

4 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/2 cup salted butter

3 cups pecans; coarsely chop 2 cups and leave the third cup whole

To Serve. Pour half a cup of heavy whipping cream into a mix bowl and mix with a hand mixer on high until loose peaks form. Add 1 tablespoon of maple syrup and a dash of cinnamon powder, and mix for another ~30 seconds until well combined. This is your maple cinnamon cream for serving.

Pairing. Calumet Farm Small Batch Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whisky.

how to make it

Dough.

Place about two thirds of the flour, all of the sugar, and the salt into a food processor and pulse twice to mix. Then spread the butter pats evenly across the surface and pulse until the dough just begins to come together. Sprinkle the remaining flour on the surface and pulse again until just incorporated.

Transfer to a bowl and sprinkle with the water 1-2 tablespoons at a time. Using a rubber spatula, work the water into the dough so it begins to hold together. Do not overwork your dough.

Once incorporated, divide into two disks, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for ~2 hours. Remove from fridge, roll out, and place in pie pan. *Note: you want this crust slightly salty as the pecan pie filling is quite sweet, so if you don’t use salted butter, be sure to add a little extra salt.

Pie.

Heat oven to 400. Par bake the pie crust for 15 minutes in heated oven using pie weights (or dried beans in my case) to weigh it down. Remove from oven and lower temperature to 350.

Whisk together sugar, maple syrup, corn syrup, cinnamon, salt, and vanilla. Add eggs and whisk thoroughly until combined. Brown butter in saucepan over medium-high heat (until it turns brown… stirring so as not to burn). Gradually pour butter into the egg mixture (slowly… so as not to scramble your egg!). Mix in the two cups of chopped pecans.

Spoon pecan mixture into pie crust. Now you’re going to use that last cup of whole pecans to get super fancy, placing them around the top of the pie so the end product looks as pictured.

Bake for 20 minutes in the oven, then remove from oven and cover with tinfoil so the crusts do not burn. Another 30 minutes in the oven and the middle should be set. Let cool and serve at room temperature with the fresh maple cinnamon cream!

Pot Roast

This is the main course for the Whiskey Pairing Dinner and, my, what a deep, flavorful pot roast this is! Let me start by saying that I sourced a 4.6 pound chuck roast from the Spring House Farm Store to feed the four of us and had no regrets. A simple pot roast is easy enough to pull off especially if you have a slow cooker, but this really takes the flavor profile up a notch to make this velvety, sinful, fall-off-your-fork roast with plenty of fall veggies.

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November 14, 2021 3 Comments

brussels sprout recipe whiskey pairing whisky one and a half slices

Spicy Brussels

Brussels Sprouts are one of our favorite falltime veggies, especially when they’re made crispy. There are so many unique toppings for sprouts (sprouts!) that they’ll never get boring. Here they are paired with a round, fruit-forward Orkney Island Scotch Whiskey to really accentuate their sweetness.

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November 14, 2021 2 Comments

Sazerac

This is the opening cocktail for the Whiskey Pairing Dinner. The Rye Sazerac is one of the oldest, prohibition-era cocktails. It’s classic, elegant, and simple. With rye whiskey, lemon, absinthe, and bitters, a Sazerac is as refined as a cocktail can be. Here we present this simple cocktail recipe as a forward to the rest of a classic meal. The absinthe on the nose provides an interesting twist to a classically whiskey-based cocktail. We used Sazerac Rye as the base.

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November 13, 2021 3 Comments

Smoked Old Fashioned

Imagine your favorite bourbon (or rye) poured over that 2 inch ice cube – that satisfying crack the ice makes when the liquid hits its surface. Knowing that your drink only gets sweeter the closer you get to emptying your glass because the sugar crystals tend to collect at the bottom. A deeply caramelized orange peel rests on top; notes of burnt sugar and citrus fill your nose every time you take a sip. And your cherries of choice – fresh cherries in the summertime settled in your fridge in a cocktail of cinnamon and maple syrup, Luxardo Amarena (a classic cocktail favorite), perhaps Jack Rudy’s… either way, your drink is perfect and your evening complete. Now, let’s take this classic cocktail to the next level with… smoke. Smoked Old Fashioneds have become somewhat of a popular thing around the five star dining scene but it is surprisingly not that difficult to replicate at home. All you need is a small blow torch like this one and some wood (I know, right?! Added bonus). If you want to completely ignore the smoked bit and just use the recipe to make an Old Fashioned, that’s fair game as well.

Looking for other variations? You could always give the Burnt Peach Old Fashioned or the Classic Manhattan a try.

what you need

2oz bourbon or rye whiskey of choice (if you’re at a loss, check out my Whiskey Post)

2 dashes bitters of choice

1 sugar cube

1 orange slice

1 cocktail cherry

1 large ice cube

(optional) 1 orange peel slice

(optional) additional sugar for caramelizing

For smoking:

1 cedar plank. You can order these on Amazon; they are the same ones used to make cedar plank salmon

1 small blow torch

how to make it

Smoke your glass: Pick a spot on the cedar plank and get the blow torch going in a circular motion. Work up a good flame and put the flame out by placing the glass over it. Let stand ~3-5 minutes. Do not remove glass until ready to pour the cocktail. When you remove the glass, quickly insert the large ice cube into the glass and spin it 1-2 times. The smoke is absorbed into the ice.

(optional) Caramelize your orange peel: On the other side of the cedar plank, rub the backside of an orange peel on the orange fruit to get it wet, then coat is generously with sugar. Use the blow torch to caramelize the sugar on top, again, being generous with the flame.

Muddle and Mix: You can make your drink right in the drinking glass or in a separate mixing glass. I like to make it in my mixing glass and strain the mixed beverage over the ice cube. Place an orange slice, a sugar cube, and two dashes of bitters in a glass and muddle well until combined. Add the bourbon, stir with ice, and strain into the glass over the smoked ice cube. Or just follow my basic Old Fashioned recipe.

Serve: Garnish with cocktail cherry and the caramelized orange slice, if you so chose.

Backstory

After making it 30 years on the planet, I’ve discovered a handful of universal truths. Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. Brown liquor is better than clear. Jose Cuervo and I had a disagreement in college that put me off tequila forever and somewhere in the void between my apologetic youth and womanhood, I discovered whiskey. How I discovered whiskey is the story that follows.

The year is 2014. I am 24 with a very fancy title. My first job out of graduate school is as the Deputy Director of Operations at a large company in Washington D.C. My boss, a stately, reputable, metrosexual gentleman with a very large collection of perfectly tailored suits, had read a Harvard Business Review article about prioritizing talent over experience. Graying and midway through his years of mentorship, he decided to give me an opportunity and bring me into the brave new world of Govcon (government contracting). I was excited to be there, star-struck by the fancy dinners and plethora of BMWs, and had absolutely no idea how to do my job. A few weeks into my new role, and after the purchase of a lightly used all black Cadillac ATS, we won a contract. Or lost a contract. I don’t actually remember. My boss (the Vice President of Operations) saunters into my office around 4pm on a Thursday to announce the news – again, good or bad, I couldn’t say.

“This calls for something special!” he announces, loudly. “You drink whiskey, yes?”

“Of course!” I sputter, attempting to be nonchalant. And he proceeds to pull a bottle of Laphroaig Quarter Cask from his bottom desk drawer and retrieve two glasses from the communal kitchen. For those of you who have read my Whiskey Post, you know that Laphroaig has a reputation as one of the peatiest scotches one can purchase. It’s basically like learning to MMA fight first time go in a UFC ring. I was brazen.

He handed me a healthy pour and downed his in a single gulp, slamming his cup to the table and reaching for the bottle to refill. I, not wanting to seem timid but also not knowing what to expect, sloshed half the liquid haphazardly into my mouth and held it there for a second. My tongue ached and the peat hit the back of my throat like liquid fire as I clumsily swallowed my share. I tried not to let my eyes water or sputter or wince, but I’m sure it was all over my face. It was terrible. I finished my glass and accepted another.

This ritual repeated itself almost every Thursday or Friday for several years. As time wore on and my boss and I grew closer – like friends – we went out whiskey tasting, scotch tasting, cigar smoking, and I was gradually inducted into the secret world of Gentlemen. It felt a bit like Mad Men but I wasn’t opposed. It took me four years to tell my (now former) boss that I had never had whiskey when we met.

A few weeks before the Laphroaig incident I had wandered into a liquor store looking for a bottle or two of something to have on the shelf for ‘entertaining.’ I had a brand new, modern-styled, Arlington apartment, and had it in my head that I was going to host dinner parties and happy hours like an adult. Why I thought the rarified air of Washington D.C. was suddenly going to make me a raging extrovert, I’m not sure, but somehow I saw myself abandoning videogames and quiet evenings writing on the deck for the parties thrown by John Cusack’s ex-girlfriend Charlie in High Fidelity. This didn’t turn out to be the case. Here I am eight years later, in a nicer house with an even nicer Cadillac, still playing videogames on a Friday night.

Anyway, I had selected from a shelf of libations, none of which I recognized save the Cuervo and the Cruzan, a large bottle of Woodford Reserve Double Oaked Bourbon Whiskey. Why? I liked the bottle and needed something that would look nice on my kitchen counter. Again, for ‘hosting.’ The bottle had been sitting unattended on said bar for several months. One particularly lonely Friday evening several months into my D.C. residence (after the Laphroaig incident), I decided to give it a try. After all, it had to look like I actually drank the stuff when someone came over. I poured some over a few ice cubes and started to sip.

For several months after, I drank whiskey ginger – Woodford Reserve with Maine Root Ginger Beer. It was kind of like a Dark and Stormy – a drink I had come to appreciate in graduate school along with the local Erie bartender’s version of a Hemmingway (my version coming soon to the blog). Eventually my tastes became accustomed to straight bourbon whiskey, scotch, and the like. Today, it is obviously my favorite beverage, but it definitely took some acclimation. I am proud to say there are several whiskey converts out there in the world due to my influence – an ex boyfriend or two, my 21 year old nephew, a former intern-turned-friend. My shelf is filled with smooth scotches and interesting bourbons, and my recipe book filled with Manhattans, Boulevardiers, Sazeracs, and Old Fashioned smoking techniques. It has been a journey but, in the end, I’ve found my flavor. For now. They say your taste buds change about every seven years. 🥃