Amanda Rockman's Chocolate Rye Pecan Pie | Rhoda's Road To Thanksgiving

In this series, follow Culinary Director Rhoda Boone as she develops the Made In Thanksgiving 2023 Menu, a thoughtfully curated collection of recipes from a few of our most innovative chef customers. This episode focuses on Rhoda’s attempts to master Chef Amanda Rockman’s Chocolate Rye Pecan Pie. After she struggled to nail the chocolate shortbread pie crust, chocolate and pecan filling, and smoked vanilla whipped cream (yes, that involves smoking an actual vanilla bean), Chef Rockman offered to come to the Made In Studio in Austin to help her out in person. Watch and learn all Chef Rockman’s tricks to achieve the ultimate pecan pie to make for your friends and family this year.

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The Made in Thanksgiving Menu: https://madeincookware.com/blogs/thanksgiving-menu-2023
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Every year at maid in we put together an amazing Thanksgiving menu I start working on it in the summertime and it’s one of my favorite things to work on last year we got a turkey from Tom kikio we got a lovely brazed cabbage from masama Bailey and we got a stuffing from

Nancy Silverton I know I had a big challenge ahead to try to top last year’s menu to get started think about which chefs we want to reach out to so who’s doing cool stuff that year who haven’t we worked with in the past on the Thanksgiving menu who do we want to

Highlight so heading into Thanksgiving and holiday season we’re really focusing on our core products so I start to think about which cookware we want to feature which dishes might pair well with that and which chefs to bring it all together we want to reach out across the country

Via email via text to put out the fers and see what we can come back with so at this point I start to get recipes in from the chef and they come in in all different forms they can be a spreadsheet they can be chicken scratch

On a napkin you know they come in all different ways my biggest challenge is formatting the recipes from Chef recipes and restaurant recipes to something that a home cook can read so you know taking a recipe for 100 pies and shrinking it down to One one dish that I have this year on the menu that I’m really excited about is Amanda rockman’s pecan pie this is a really pie because it has a chocolate shortbread crust it has Rye Whiskey In The Filling along with chunks of chocolate that almost act like chocolate

Chips and it has a beautiful smoked vanilla whipped cream topping I open up the email from Amanda and it’s a spreadsheet doesn’t have a ton of information but it’s obviously laid out for restaurant production I started working on the crust first I didn’t have an industrial size stand mixer so I

Thought I’d just go ahead and try to make it in my smaller 5 quart stand mix mixer it definitely did not work when I rolled it out it was crumbling and falling apart and I really wasn’t sure if I was doing it right when it started

To bake and it it looked kind of speckled with these pools of chocolate inside and I felt like that was probably not what it was supposed to look like I was worried about it it was it was a mess I’ll admit it I might have used a

Few expletives that day so at that point I was emailing a bunch of questions to Amanda she was writing me back and decided to invite her into the kitchen to show me in real life how to make this pie Amanda graciously agreed to come in

And teach me how to make her pie in our studio so I’ve made your pie a couple times the first one is not good enough to show you at all and it’s already gone it actually got eaten so people enjoyed it but pie got eaten so that’s I’m happy

About that and I’ve made another one okay that I have here to show you maybe we can try it talk about it let’s get into it okay so what do you think about the crust I think I think the crust looks great I think that the thickness is

Lovely I would maybe go a smidge thinner and just cuz it was like kind of hard to get through like the chocolate flavor the Rye definitely comes out I think that I would serve this a little bit more room temperature and then you can like pipe your whipped cream like right

Before it goes out to the table for Thanksgiving I’m seeing a a lot of like liquid in here I think maybe it’s just a little underbaked okay it would be my guess okay not mad about it uh-huh let’s get started with the crust let’s do it okay then she helped me uh

Really understand what type of dough it was cuz it’s it’s creamed together kind of like a cookie dough uh it’s not your typical pie dough where you’re starting with cold butter and trying to create flaky layers so what kind of dough would you say this is this is like a

Traditionalish tar dough I wanted to create something that was a little bit more chocolatey and flavor and had just like a little bit more of like a bite than like a flaky crust we’re going to first take our butter which you want to use room temperature butter this allows

You to really cream your butter so usually when I make pough I want really cold butter because you want to keep those those little chunks of butter so that when it evaporates it creates that puff here since we’re making more of like a tart dough you’re actually incorporating the butter so it’s a

Little bit smoother at this point I’m going to give you this little my little tambourine you’re going to sift out your powder sugar and your salt I like to let it mix on low until I I know that all the dries have been Incorporated in the

Butter so we’re going to let this mix probably for a good five minutes then we’re going to scrape down the bowl making sure that like again everything gets brought to the bottom everything’s taken off the paddle and again we’re mixing it again we’re trying to make sure this is homogeneous everything’s

Mixed together it’s going to get really fluffy it’s going to get um larger in volume and it’s going to be really light in color here you noticed there’s not a ton of volume but it’s nice and creamy it still has like a yellowish tinge from the butter but again it’s super creamy

Like frosting so she showed me how to sift the ingredients she explained why she taught me her boat method of creating parchment almost funnel to send the dry ingredients into the stand mixer we talked about what the different flowers were bringing to the dough between an almond flour cake flour and

Allpurpose flour so the reason why I did two flowers is that there’s different protein contents it’s ranging from higher protein to um lower protein that gives it strength so because we’re trying to create a like tender pastry we’re going to use items that have lower

Protein so I split it in between two so that you know it’s still has um a nice crunch but again um this has a lower protein so it’s still tender so I explained to Amanda that when I had made the pough it was too much for my stand

Mixer she brought her industrial size stand mixer so that we could make it together eventually we ended up reducing that recipe down to make just one crust because her recipe actually made three so you only need one crest for the recipe and you can actually use a

Smaller sand mixer but when we started out on this journey we were using the big boy so I didn’t quite I it was really hard to get it all mixed together because as you know I was using a smaller sand mixer so I ended up just

Putting it into a bowl and trying to kind of like work it together that must have been kind of upsetting it was hard but I got through it um at this point I’m going to kind of smoosh the tart so the texture that you’re looking for is kind of like a

Thick sugar cookie dough um and we’re going to we’re going to chill this so that it firms up why do you have to let a dough like this rest sure one um you you want to make sure that the gluten rests and also two like imagine trying

To shape that M now that would be something to cry about um so we want to let it firm up um and we want to let the gluten rest it also great to see her roll out the dough I was trying to make a rectangle into a circle but she she

Just rolled the dough into a rectangle and then cut it into a circle something that I commonly see people doing is that they feel like they can only roll like this but what they don’t understand is that your body can move right and at the same time your dough can move and you

Have to work quickly like this isn’t something that you can like take a little break and you know go have a snack make a ham sandwich and I’m not making a circle I’m making a a nice little square what do you do if it gets

Too soft too soft you can always put it on a sheet tray and put it in the fridge don’t be a hero don’t be a hero put the dough back in the fridge I beg you the dough bags here it’s like help me I’m getting soft now at this point take my

Beautiful Maiden knife so how much of an uh circumference are you giving it there I would say this is probably half an inch to 3/4 of an inch and then once we had the P do in the pie dish you showed me how to kind of pinch it around the

Rim and then go back in and crimp the crust at this point I’m going to just bring it down making sure it’s hitting the bottom and at this point I’m going to use the pads of my thumbs and I’m just going to kind of gently push it in

To the bottom crass of the plate see that you get that nice crisp Edge so do you want it to be kind of flush with the pie dish um I do at this point because now I’m going to go back so I want to trim a little bit okay so now I’m going

To kind of use this like claw effect con a kitten um and I’m just going to push the tart dough up so that’s what I kind of meant like by like rounding The Edge and again this again this does kind of feel like Play-Doh do feel empowered to move

It around you do need to move quickly what I really love about this dish and I did not realize it until I made a pie in here that one like the the depth of it is really nice but the lip really supports the edge of your pies when

You’re creating a design it really supports it and that makes me so happy nothing is worse when you take a pie out and you’re like it’s beautiful and then like one little thing cracks off and you’re like I have to redo this now I like to allow things to chill um

Especially when I create like something like a design that has edges um I want to chill it completely down before I put it in the oven how long um I would say at least 2 hours okay so like go work on something else take a walk watch a show read a book

And then once we had the P do in the pie dish you blind bake the crust for about 15 minutes with baking rice and then you remove that uh coffee filter with the rice and continue baking it until it’s dry to the touch then we moved on to the

Next portion of the recipe which is the filling I had to order a lot of special ingredients for this pie including glucose syrup you know I’ve made pie with can syrup or corn syrup but never with glucose syrup so I was kind of curious why that was being used in this

Filling and what effect that was going to have so we you know we had chatted about why I use glucose versus corn syrup I like it because it’s less sweet um than corn syrup so anytime that I can lower the deciel of sweetness I’m going

To try to find a way glucose is really sticky so you’re going to see this um something that you can do you can also microwave it lightly and it’ll come out a little bit easier but for the sake of seeing the struggle we’re going to do it

This way okay so glucose also helps with texture it helps items not to crystallize um we got light brown sugar I’m going to add some butter I make a pecan pie for Thanksgiving every year but I’ve never made a filling in quite this way she actually melted the sugar

The glucose syrup and the butter together to make a really homogeneous filling and then used an immersion blender to add the eggs so that everything was really well Incorporated a little Ry whiskey got stirred in there and then that gets chilled overnight before baking off the pie the next step

Of the filling that was different was the that mixture of toasted pecans and chocolate chips so we have our chopped to pecans and I have 72% dark chocolate if you want to go milk chocolate you can go milk chocolate butterscotch whatever you want I like dark chocolate I like to add my

Pans and then I add my chocolate and the big big little chips like that yes I preer that now again if you wanted to melt out more and be less studded with chocolate like a chocolate chip cookie you can cut them up I prefer not to

Because I like when it bakes out you get these like little medallions of like shiny chocolate on the top I really like that aesthetic so again personal preference that is mine then you’re going to take your cooled peacon filling and you’re going to flood in your pie at

This point I’m going to put it in a 325° oven I’m going to start with 15 minutes I’m going to check it out probably rotate and then what we’re looking for is a nice golden brown and you don’t want it to jiggle at all you

Want it to kind of when you move it it like all stays in one place adding a little bit more flavor I like to brush a little bit more of the Rye M Whiskey on top just to make sure you really get that flavor in and like one of the first

Bites it’s really you’re really going to feel it I was worried about it the first time I made it because the chocolate wasn’t really melting and kind of incorporating into the rest of the filling but that actually intentional so you when you look at the pie it almost

Looks like a chocolate chip cookie you have pools of chocolate in there mixing them with the pans mix in with the filling and that’s how she wants it to be when we made the whip topping I really got a kick out of smoking the vanilla bean uh I know that Amanda makes

A bajillion of these pecan pies every year so I’m sure she’s smoking more than just one vanilla bean but it was pretty fun to just smoke alone vanilla bean in our our girl frying pan outside our office I’ve never turned on a smoker to smoke something this small before butt

Work it right sure yeah had some trials and tribulations had some rainy weather but um got it smoked for you lovely so what I like about this idea of smoking the vanilla bean is that it adds another layer of flavor we’re kind of tamping down the sweetness we’re we’re adding in

More interesting flavors to the whole um the whole pie if you will and I think that smoked vanilla is a really wonderful smell and flavor we took that vanilla bean and scraped it into a cream and once the cream is infused with the smoked vanilla bean you added your sugar

Salt and karagin in which is something that helps stabilize the whipped cream once it’s piped onto your pie so we’re going to garnish this with two things our smoked uh vanilla chantilli which we put into a bag with a tip and I have atomized chocolates now if you can’t

Find atomized chocolate you can use cocoa powder I prefer atomized chocolate because it is literally adom IED chocolate which has a more chocolate flavor opposed to cocoa powder which is a little bit more bitter right now we are going to pipe little rosettes onto

The pie the way that I like to do it is I like to think of it as slices so I’m going to pipe like one and then across the way and then one and across the way so I’m trying to make as even as possible and

Then and then I just gently dust around the edge and then a little bit on the chanelli and that is your chocolate Rye on pie you tried my pie and now we’re going to try mine yes it’s only fair would you please do me the honors would love

To look at that slice of pie yeah she’s pretty for sure not as juicy as my pie nope it it is not but um we’re going to see how it tastes let’s go from there I love the way all the flavors are playing together like you said there’s

Not one that’s like super high it’s kind of like equal sweetness pecan chocolate then you get the Rye so just it really allows you to have multif flavors in one dish what really struck me by having Amanda come to the maiden Studio was just her level of detail in every single

Step and not only had she written that into the recipe but she explained why why are you sifting your ingredients for the crust she really explained every step of the way what she was doing and also why there’s some things that a recipe can’t teach you and you can

Really learn a lot by watching someone do something well thank you I just I think it’s really what I what I try to express is um sharing information and educating so that people feel empowered to make their own you know I I would never want pastries to be scary um so if

This helps you in any way to try it on your own then I’ve done my job my biggest takeaway I think is I just didn’t make it long enough yep I agree like I think overall like it was very similar so I think you did a really good

Job give yourself a hand give yourself some Grace um and every time you make it you have more information moving forward to make it even better yeah I think next time I’m going to nail it you’re going to absolutely nail it so after Amanda left and showed me all of her sips and

Tricks I gathered my ingredients and decided to give it one last try one thing that really helped is the original Pi recipe was actually enough to make three pies but she reduced it down to one so I was able to do it in a stand

Mixer and it was just a lot less volume to to work with and a lot easier for me so I worked on the pyo got that into my quarter sheet tray and chilled it overnight the next day I rolled out the pyo just like she showed me trimmed it

Around the pie dish worked it into the pie dis didn’t worry too much about how it looked but remembered that it was kind of like this malleable substance that I could make look how I wanted to just took my time with crimping it it and got that in the oven to Blind bake

After that I worked on the filling left the chocolate chunks as they were toasted off the pcons and worked on the the mixture of glucose butter and light brown sugar to uh make the filling finally put the whole thing together let the pie cool it was looking beautiful I

Piped the cream on top dusted it with a little cocoa powder and served it to my friends and that’s how you make Amanda rockman’s chocolate Rye pecan pie for more Thanksgiving recipes from our Chef customers please check out Maiden cookware.com I’m Roa from the maiden Studio thank you for watching and I’ll

See you next time