Chocolate-bottomed Pecan Pie

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( Dessert Serves: 8 Prep Time: 180 minutes)

If the pie shell is frozen, place it in the refrigerator -- you want it cold but not frozen. (Yes, I'm That Heathen who uses commercial shells.)

Break up the chocolate in a small microwave-safe bowl and melt it -- roughly 3 minutes at 50% on most microwaves.

Pour the chocolate into the pie shell and spread it around the bottom and sides with the back of a spoon, like spreading sauce on a pizza.

Place shell in refrigerator to set the chocolate.

Line the middle rack of the oven with aluminum foil, and preheat to 375 degrees.

(You can do the below with just a fork and a bowl -- you can use a mixer, but it's overkill.)

Break the eggs into a largish bowl, and beat. Add the sugar and salt, and mix thoroughly.

Melt the butter in the microwave in a small bowl. Fold gradually into the egg mixture, stirring as you do so that the eggs don't set.

Add the corn syrup and bourbon; mix everything well.

Strew the pecans evenly in the pie shell, and pour enough of the mixture over them, making sure they all get covered in the mixture. Important: you should fill the pie shell most but not all the way up! The filling will puff up as it bakes, and if you fill it too far it will run over the sides and burn in the oven! Make sure there is at least 1/4 inch of clearance above the filling. There will be some extra unused filling.

Place the pies carefully in the oven, on the tin foil.

Bake for about 50 minutes, until the center no longer "sloshes" when you jostle it. (It may still jiggle slightly.)

Remove from the oven, and cool on a wire rack. The pie can do without refrigeration for a couple of days, but I usually prefer to keep it refrigerated, to keep the chocolate hard when you cut into it.

The ingredients are listed for one pie, but I usually make two. (Note that that results in one bar of chocolate and one bottle of corn syrup.)

This makes somewhat too much filling for one pie; I leave the recipe as it is for simplicity, but you can reduce everything except the chocolate and pecans to reduce waste. (I might eventually adjust the proportions here accordingly.) If making four pies at once, use only three recipes worth of filling and it comes out about right.

If you don't want to use bourbon, substitute 1 tsp vanilla instead.

You can increase the chocolate if desired, but keep in mind that the more chocolate you use, the less volume is available for filling, and the harder the bottom crust will be.

After many years of making pecan pie, I've concluded that I prefer regular crusts, but you can use Deep Dish instead. If so, you probably want to increase the chocolate, to cover the sides better. The deep dish shell will hold roughly a full recipe of filling. It will take considerably longer to bake (70-80 minutes), and you may need a pie shield to keep the edges from burning. The top will caramelize a bit, and be a touch chewy.

I've been experimenting with pecan pie for many years, hybridizing recipes from various books. One day, back in the mid-2000s, Jane and I went out to dinner at J's Restaurant at Nashoba Valley Winery, and they served something like this; I decided that it was the platonic ideal of pecan pie, and set out to reverse-engineer it. I won't claim that this is quite as good as theirs, but it's a fair stab, with the dark chocolate nicely offsetting the intense sweetness of the filling.

Uses: Oven

Goes With: Works well with ice cream or whipped cream, but really doesn't need either. Goes very well with good coffee.

Justin du Coeur (jducoeur) -- Chocolate-bottomed Pecan Pie:Review

-- Pretty much my standard dessert at this point. My family usually insists that I make four of these for Christmas week.