You’d be nuts not to try this pie recipe

Schreiner's pecan pie is a feast for the eye and palate. Picture: Tony Jackman

Schreiner's pecan pie is a feast for the eye and palate. Picture: Tony Jackman

Published Mar 19, 2015

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Cradock - Pecans are to this region what grapes are to the Western Cape. Ubiquitous. The local crop.

Not far from the punnets of hanepoot and other grapes on supermarket shelves here you’ll find plastic tubs filled to the brim with crisp, cheerful pecan nuts, ready for your kitchen ministrations.

When you open a little bistro in the town, somebody arrives with a big bag of pecans tied at the top with a tartan ribbon. This is quite a relief, as by now you will have become accustomed to the price in the shops. Pecans do not come cheap. You soon learn that its much cheaper to buy packets of broken pecans, and if the nuts are going into pecan pies, this makes double sense because you’d need to break the whole ones if that’s where they were headed. The shock of having to pay R120 for a 500g tub dissipates slightly once you’ve learnt to buy broken.

Ah, but then you learn to buy from source, directly from the farmer, which brings the price way down so that now I pay in the region of R120 for a kilogram, not 500g. That’s much more like it.

Apparently the bulk of Cradock’s pecans are exported, so if you spot punnets of pecans in your travels, chances are they might have originated right here on the prettily green farms of the Fish River Valley that runs past the town. Now there’s a topic of contention. You’d think there’d be walkways along the river banks and a picnic area here and there, and that locals would spend their weekends enjoying the riverside in the way that Capetonians enjoy the promenade at Sea Point. But you’d be wrong. The river’s banks are infested with litter and locals counsel you not to wander along the banks as (they say) it’s not safe.

And the council, you’re told, has more interest in fat salaries than anything to do with the potential pleasures of living in this otherwise (fairly) lovely town.

I say “fairly” because there’s one thing that would transform Cradock: the state of the “tarred” roads. They’re as broken as a bag of pecan nuts. I write “tarred” in quotation marks because many of the streets have more by way of potholes than tar, and the rest, on some of the streets, is a random patchwork of black or grey splotches where the holes have been filled. Dare one ask the council to budget to tar them properly? Perhaps take a collective salary dip of a million or two for the next financial year?

But to hope for that would be (to keep the theme going) just nuts.

After three or four months in the town, you hardly notice the potholes any more and your car seems to nip around them of its own accord. Pecan nuts have become a key ingredient in your restaurant kitchen, and you’ve learnt to keep them in the freezer. They don’t freeze as such. They just become very cold and retain their crisp, brittle character. Pecan farmers taught me this.

Like other nuts, pecans are versatile little blighters. You can toast them briefly in a hot frying pan, being careful that they don’t burn, and scatter them over salads. You can pop them in a blender with rocket or basil, olive oil, garlic and Parmesan cheese and whizz them into a lovely pesto to go over pasta, into sandwiches or to be a special ingredient in a chicken dish.

If you have a little bistro and tea room in Cradock, you’d be wise always to have pecan pie on your menu. I find that recipes adapt over time, as if of their own accord. The pecan pie recipe I started with in November has slowly been altered here and there until it became one that I’m happy with. I started off wanting to keep my recipe a secret, but this is a column about food and the cooking of it, and since it is our flagship sweet dish it would seem churlish to withhold it from you.

So, here it is...

 

SCHREINER’S PECAN PIE

(Makes two pecan pies)

1 cup (250ml) caramel sugar

1/4 cup softened butter

3 cups (750ml) golden syrup

2 Tbs whisky

3 jumbo eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract or essence

1/2 tsp salt

2 cups (500ml) broken pecan nuts

Cream whipped with a little vanilla essence for serving

1 packet puff pastry, or make your own

Roll out the pastry. Grease two pie dishes. Place the dish on the pastry and cut a around about 3cm wider than the dish. Place this in each dish and prick the bottom about 20 times. Crimp the edges of the pastry with your fingers and place in the fridge for 15 minutes.

In a saucepan, bring the golden syrup, sugar, butter and whisky to a simmer, and do keep an eye on it because if you don’t it will overflow and make a terrible mess on the stove. Once it is bubbling, keep stirring for a minute, then leave it off the stove to cool to room temperature.

When it is cool, add the eggs (beaten first), the vanilla, the salt and the pecans. Stir to combine, then pour into the pastry shells. Bake in an oven pre-heated to 180°C, for 40 to 45 minutes. Place on a wire rack to cool. Serve at room temperature with a dollop of cream.

Weekend Argus

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