Tar Heel (Chocolate Pecan) Pie, Gluten-Free

Happy Monday, all!  I hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving holiday (if you’re in the US) and are ready to gear up for the holiday season.  Before we move on though, I wanted to share a new dessert I made for Thanksgiving this year.  As you may know, I am a chocoholic and I usually make a chocolate cake to go with the pumpkin pie we have for dessert.  This year I did something a bit different. I decided to make a chocolate pecan pie.  I love me my chocolate!  But this wasn’t like any chocolate pecan pie I’d ever had.  This pie is more like a chocolate pecan brownie inside of a pie crust. In essence, it is a cake and a pie at the same time.  Can’t get much better than that!

The pie I made was an adaptation of the Tar Heel Pie from the new book,  Southern Pies: A Gracious Plenty of Pie Recipes, From Lemon Chess to Chocolate Pecan, by Nancie McDermott.  As you may know, North Carolina is the Tar Heel state.  No one is clear on why it got this name.  Most agree that it has something to do with the state’s pine forests, which created the vast amounts of tar, pitch, and turpentine that served as the state’s most important exports in the early part of its history.  And as you know, I am a wanna-be Southern girl, so any recipe that has its roots in Southern history is OK by me.  According to McDermott, this pie is much beloved in North Carolina–and it is now much beloved by my family!

This pie is truly amazing.  It’s like nothing I have ever had–and I am so very glad I found it.  Because it’s like a rich chocolate pecan brownie nestled in flaky pie crust it is, for me, like a dream come true.  The pie went very quickly on Thanksgiving.  That’s saying a lot–my family and Thanksgiving guests are all pumpkin pie fans!  It was so good I made another one this past weekend.  We couldn’t get enough of it.

Many of the recipes in the McDermott’s book look terrific to me.  I will be exploring them further in the upcoming months.  The thing I’m really enjoying about the book is that it’s not only devoted to conventional fruit pies.  Many of the pies are custard-based (which I love), or based on unusual fruits and vegetables.  She’s got recipes for Green Tomato Pie, Persimmon Pie, and Muscadine Grape Hull Pie.  And she has a whole section of variations of the Chess Pie.  I can’t wait to experiment with all of these.

Oh, and about the Tar Heel Pie.  It’s terrific by itself or served with a bit of whipped cream on the top–delish!

Tar Heel Pie, Gluten-Free (with adaptations for dairy-free)
-adapted from Southern Pies, by Nancie McDermott

Makes one 9 inch pie

Special Equipment Needed
-9 inch pie plate
-rolling pin

Ingredients
1/2 recipe for Flaky Pie Crust, Gluten-Free
1/2 cup (1 stick; 4oz; 115g) unsalted butter (or butter substitute)
1 cup (170g) semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup (70g) Jeanne’s Gluten-Free All-Purpose Flour Mix
1/2 cup (100g) granulated sugar
1/2 cup (105g) packed light or dark brown sugar (l like dark)
1 cup (60g) chopped pecans
2 large or extra large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract

Make, roll out, and line your pie pan with the pie crust. Place in refrigerator until needed.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

In a small saucepan, melt the butter over very low heat. Watch carefully that it doesn’t burn. Once melted, remove from heat and add the chocolate chips.  Let these melt into the butter for 1 minute and then whisk together the mixture until smooth.

In a medium bowl, combine the flour and sugars and whisk together well. Add the pecans and toss to coat them evenly with flour. Add the eggs, vanilla and the chocolate mixture. With a large spoon, stir to mix everything together into a rich batter. Remove pie dough-lined pan from the refrigerator and pour the filling into the pie pan.

Place the pie pan on the lowest shelf of the oven. Bake at 350 degrees until the pie is puffy, browned, and a bit dry and firm, about 30-40 mins.  It should look like a brownie in a pie crust (which is basically what it is).

Remove from oven, place on a wire rack to cool completely.

Enjoy!

Note:  If you use a different gluten-free flour mix, alter the amount of or eliminate the xanthan gum or use a different gluten-replacer, use dairy-free or egg-free substitutes, or change any other ingredients in this recipe, your results may not match my results.

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