Winter in Wisconsin is not a good time for fruit pie baking. Unless you are a canner of fruits there are no locally grown fruits available, and the market price for fruit is often way too high to justify. This makes winter the perfect time for baking nut pies. Nuts aren’t necessarily cheap, but they are a tasty alternative to imported or canned fruits.
With this in mind I offer four nut pies for winter bakers: Chocolate Pecan Whiskey Pie, Toasted Coconut Macadamia Pie, Pear Walnut and Blue Cheese Pie, and Pine Nut Pie.
I am not a big fan of traditional pecan pies. The excess of corn syrup is far too sweet for me, and doesn’t have other taste qualities that moderate the sweetness. Chocolate pecan pie adds the delightful creaminess and flavor of chocolate to the mix, reducing the need for so much Karo. Then, when you add in the 1/4 cup of whiskey, you get just a hint in the background of oaky fermented grains. I then topped the pie with a combination of fresh whipped cream with whipped egg whites (meringue) folded into the cream. The cream mix was spread over the pie, and then topped with chocolate dipped pecans and shaved curls of dark chocolate infused with orange. You can find the recipe for this pie here.
What makes the pie special is the use of toasted coconut. You can do this simply by putting flaked coconut into a dry skillet on medium low heat and letting it brown for 8-10 minutes. Be sure to toss the coconut frequently so it does not burn. The toasting caramelizes the coconut sugars, producing a much richer flavor when incorporated into the filling. This pie has a meringue topping. Confession time for The Pie Dude: I never made a meringue pie before this one. Whipping the meringue was easy. Spreading the meringue was easy. It looked lovely with the lightly browned coconut after baking. You can find the recipe for this pie here.
The first two pies were cream pies with nut toppings. Now we come to pies in which nuts are a principal ingredient. Admittedly Pear Walnut and Blue Cheese is in part a fruit pie. So it sort of goes against my theme of fruit pie not being winter pie. So here is the caveat: if there is one fruit well suited to the winter it is the pear. The are abundantly available and relatively inexpensive in winter, and cry out to be baked. The nice thing about this pie is the way it combines the sweetness of pears, the earthiness of the walnuts and the tanginess of the blue cheese. One taster observed that pears walnuts and blue cheese make a great salad and an even better pie.
My final pie for this posting is a Pine Nut Pie. Much like a pecan pie this is made with a base of corny syrup, brown sugar and cinnamon. Pine nuts, however, are much milder and give the pie a smoother, more elegant flavor I topped this one with a scoop of butter pecan ice cream. Mrs. Pie Dude, as you can tell from the picture below, was very pleased with this pie.
You can read about these and other pies at
www.thepiedude.com
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www.facebook.com/ThePieDude
