Brussels foodie

Pecans are by far my favorite nuts, unfortunately the American classic of pecan pie hasn’t really made it big across the Atlantic. Time to change that! This is a slightly modified version of Martha Stewart’s pecan pie recipe, with a pastry crust from Jeroen Meus. I didn’t weigh out all the ingredients, so use this rule: 1 cup = 250 ml.

Ingredients:

for the crust:

250 gr baking flour
125 gr cold butter, in small cubes
90 gr icing sugar
30 gr ground almonds
1 egg
a pinch of salt

for the filling:

4 large eggs at room temperature
250 ml maple syrup or golden syrup (or 200 ml maple syrup + 50  ml Belgian kandijsiroop)
85 ml brown sugar and 60 ml white sugar
60 gr butter, melted
3 cups pecan nuts
2 tablespoons of brown rum
pinch of salt
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

How to

Start with the crust, as it needs cooling. Sieve the flour and icing sugar into a large bowl, add the ground almonds and salt. Add the butter and rub with between your fingers or use a pastry cutter, until all is mixed and you have a collection of crumbs. Add the egg, knead into a homogeneous mass (avoid handling the dough for too long) and shape into a ball. Wrap in plastic foil and let the ball cool in the fridge for at laeast 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 190 degrees Celsius. Before use, roll out the dough onto a flour-dusted surface until it’s large enough to fit a rimmed pie plate, mine was about 25 cm. Test by holding the pie plate over the rolled-out dough, it needs to be larger to fit the sides. Butter the pie plate and transfer the dough. Don’t worry if it breaks up a little, you can ‘paste’ it back together once it’s in the plate. Set this in the fridge until the filling is done (to my surprise, Martha Stewart didn’t recommend blind baking first, so I didn’t do this and it turned out fine).

Make sure your eggs are at room temperature, not straight from the fridge or they might clash with the melted butter. In a large bowl, whisk the eggs, syrup, sugar, butter, vanilla, rum and salt together. Mix in the pecan nuts. Pour the filling into the cold pie crust and pop into the oven. Bake for 50-60 minutes until the filling is solid, it can still be a little jiggly in the middle. Keep an eye on the pie in the oven: my pecans started to turn quite dark after a while so I turned down the heat to 170 and covered the pie with aluminum foil to prevent it from burning.

Let the pie cool in its plate. Enjoy!