Pecan Bourbon Pie with Citrus and Maple

Your favorite pecan pie with a little Bourbon, maple, and thinly sliced mandarins

Hello!

Holiday food is upon us, and I always find it a balancing act to accommodate the tandem desires for tradition and trying new things. Remember deep fried turkeys? Or maybe that became your tradition—I’m pretty sure my family tried it one year, but it didn’t stick. Dad loves a smoked bird and we have it that way most years, and the gravy from that method is SO GOOD. But to brine? Dry? Wet brine? Sohla El-Waylla has a wonderful Substack post all about various turkey methods.

Same conundrum for desserts. We almost always end up making variations on apple, pecan, and pumpkin pies. A strong contender for a fourth pie—or maybe apple has to be replaced—would be David Tanis’ beautiful Cranberry Curd Tart that he published in the New York Times years ago and now has become a solid classic along the lines of Marion Burros’ Plum Torte.

I’ll be making the Caramel Pumpkin Tart that I published last week—it’s a pretty and elegant tart that has a little caramel mixed into the filling and will make the traditionalists happy too. It makes a beautiful presentation—the filling is smooth and silky, and the top develops a mirror-like finish and doesn’t crack.

This pecan pie is similar in that it has the basics—flaky crust, sweet filling, pecans—but I add a little maple, Bourbon, and best of all, kishu mandarins. These little mandarins are seedless, slightly tart, with a very thin skin that candies while baking and adds so much beautiful flavor and tartness that cuts through the sweet filling, I’ll always use them. If you can’t find kishus, use any small, thin-skinned mandarin. At the bakery, I developed a similar pecan pie recipe using kumquats which are wonderfully tart, although I couldn’t find them this year.

This is the pie that I keep going back to the kitchen for once we’ve all moved on to card games or Apples to Apples, and am eating it as I type out the recipe right now with some unsweetened whipped cream.

I’ve had a few questions about rolling out doughs without having them crack, so I made a video to explain how I do it:

A note on par-baking the pie crust : I rarely bake pies that require a par-baked crust, and realized while developing this recipe that sometimes training and routine can be your enemy! As all my training dictates, I used pie weights on three variations while testing but was unhappy with the results of all the crusts. Then I realized I was following protocol for wheat-based pie dough, and the weights were just serving to compact the GF dough as it was baking, and when I took them out of the pie shell to finish par-baking, I would end up with a tough, compact bottom because GF flours don’t have the same ability to trap air and keep expanding as wheat dough does.

Bake the shell without weights, and it will be flakier. You’ll need to pierce some air bubbles or push down some puffed up areas, but that doesn’t matter in the scheme of things.

A note on whether or not to toast nuts: I found that the nuts get plenty toasted while baking since most of them settle at the top of the pie. If you like extra toasty pecans, you can put them in a 325f oven for 5-7 minutes and let them cool before adding them to the filling.

How to make a collar to protect the edges of the shell from burning: When the shell is filled, you can protect the edges of the baked shell with a foil collar as below. Cut a square of foil large enough to extend by an inch all the way around. Use scissors to cut pie-shaped triangles and roll the pointed ends towards the rim of the pie shell and voila! A much easier way to make a protective collar.

Pie shell ready to bake; how to make foil collar to protect edges of shell from burning