Recipe Review: Chocolate Pecan Slab Pie
The baked pie!
King Arthur Flour came out with so many new recipes in the past month that I had a hard time picking one to make! Alas, my love for chocolate and for pecan pie won out, and I tried King Arthur Flour’s Chocolate Pecan Slab Pie recipe, found here.
This recipe was detailed, which I took to be a good sign when starting out. (I mean, more directions are better, right?) The method was divided into two main sections: making the pastry and making the pie. To begin, I made the chocolate pastry.
Chocolate pastry is always a little more risqué than normal pastry because the addition of cocoa powder makes the dough more brittle. However, making the pastry was a breeze – I just combined the cocoa powder, flour, chopped butter, and water as instructed and it came together to form a pliable dough. After chilling for about 30 minutes, I rolled out the pastry to cover a 13-by-18 inch pan.
Except by the time I had rolled the pastry out to the specified thickness (¼ inch thick), I had nowhere near enough to cover the pan. I tried rolling out the pastry again to see if I could get it to the requisite size, but I still couldn’t fill the cookie sheet. I ended up pressing the dough by hand into a 9-by-9 pan and calling it a day.
This is my one huge problem with this recipe. Everything else went fine – the filling was easy to assemble and the pie itself was easy to bake – but there wasn’t nearly enough dough to make the full-size pie, which was extremely frustrating and made this bake more stressful than fun.
The other issue I encountered was when slicing the pie. I was only able to get ⅓ of the pie out of the pan properly, even after refrigerating overnight; the rest is now sitting as pie crumble in my freezer. However, this may not be King Arthur Flour’s fault because I used a different pan. On the other hand, the filling was kind of liquid-y (despite the fact that I baked it for about 10 minutes longer than the maximum baking time) and it contributed to my inability to cut the dessert cleanly.
My sliced pie was pretty crumbly
The recipe was well-written and its directions were clear, but I had some serious problems producing a similar product. On a positive note, the pie was absolutely delicious! Overall, this recipe was average – tasty but stress-inducing and flawed – and if I made it again, I would use the scrumptious filling but pick a different pastry recipe!
Ellie is The Glen Bard's Editor-in-Chief and a senior at Glenbard West. This year is her third on the Editorial Board. She plays field hockey and chess,...
