You rarely see sweet potato pie on desserts menus at New England restaurants or bakeries. That’s because it’s strictly a southern confection that for some reason hasn’t made it up north. Instead there’s plenty of pumpkin pie recipes in our northern New England culinary sphere. It might be time to change that habit. I know I will after making sweet potato pie from a recipe courtesy of Dolester Miles, a James Beard Award pastry chef whose roots are firmly planted in Alabama–namely, at the chef Frank Stitt’s string of restaurants in Birmingham. I made the pie twice not for Thanksgiving but for a weekday dessert in my household. We just loved it.
Sliced pie with whipped cream and grated orange zest
Squash pie is another dessert in which a typical vegetable is made sweet and folded into a pie shell. In her book, the “Lost Kitchen,” chef Erin French offers a seriously delicious squash chiffon pie. Look it up and you’ll see how this is so good.
I’ve made several of Miles desserts, even the daunting coconut pecan cake, which won her the best pastry chef award in 2018 at the James Beard Foundation. It’s an extraordinary cake but not easy to make as is often the case with chefs’ recipes. The New York Times food pages published a rendition of it with some minor changes to the recipe instructions. Another recipe in the article was the lemon meringue tart with the lemon curd enriched with melted white chocolate. It’s another superb recipe from Dolester Miles.
I came across the sweet potato pie recipe in a recent issue of Garden and Gun Magazine. I made it toot de suite to add to my Thanksgiving dessert board in addition to the usual pumpkin pie. So many of these desserts are typical of southern baking, recipes that are passed down from great-granny to granny to present-day generations.. Every cafeteria and roadside shack has some version of sweet potato pie in the south; the spices may differ, the amount of cream and butter or none at all. But however you make it this is just some delicious dessert. Think of it as the best baked sweet potato in a pie shell. You get the natural sweetness of the sweet potato enriched with cream, butter, sugar, eggs and spices like cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg.
The pie differs from other versions because Miles uses a cornmeal crust. The cornmeal mixed with flour, sugar and butter makes for a pie that’s both crunchy and flaky, the crunchiness is an unexpected texture in what is basically a flaky pie dough.
Ingredients
- Crust
- 1 cup flour
- 3 tablespoons sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon coarse salt
- 1/2 cup yellow cornmeal medium grind
- 1 stick cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes
- 1 egg yolk
- 2 tablespoons ice water
- Filling
- 3 medium sweet potatoes
- 2 large eggs
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
- 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
- 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
- 1 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 3/4 cup half-and-half
- 1 teaspoon orange zest
- 1 stick butter softened
- Bourbon Chantilly Cream
- 1 cup heavy whipping cream
- 4 tablespoons sugar
- 1 1/2 tablespoons bourbon
Instructions
- Crust. Combine flour, sugar, salt and cornmeal in a food processor and pulse a few times. Add butter and pulse until the mixture resembles large peas. Mix yolk and water until combined and add to processor with motor running and then pulse once or twice until the dough holds together. Roll the dough into a ball, wrap in plastic and refrigerate for 30 minutes or longer.
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- Remove dough from refrigerator and let soften for about 10 minutes. Dust with flour and roll out to a 12-inch circle about to 1/4inch thick, then press into a 9-inch pie pan, trimming excess and crimping edges. Bake for 20 minutes covered with parchment paper and filled with dried beans or pie weights. Remove parchment and continue baking for 10 minutes or until pastry becomes lightly browned. (See notes) Allow to cool before adding filling.
- Filling. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
- Bake sweet potatoes for 25 to 30 minutes or until fork tender. (See notes) Allow to cool.
- Peel
- Place peeled sweet potatoes in the bowl of an electric mixer with paddle attachment.
- Beat on medium speed until potatoes are mashed and any strings have become wrapped around the paddle. Remove paddle attachment, wipe clean and return to mixer. (You will need 2 cups of mashed sweet potatoes for the filling.)
- Lower temperature to 350 degrees.
- Add remaining ingredients to the sweet potato mixture and mix until combined. The filling can be made as long as 2 days in advance if covered and refrigerated.
- Pour filling into pre-baked cooled crust and bake for 45 to 50 minutes or until the filling is slightly puffed and set in the middle. Start checking the pie about 10 minutes before the time is up, because every oven is different. Cool Completely on a rack.
- Top with the bourbon chantilly cream
Notes
Baking the sweet potatoes seemed too short as instructed. I think at least an hour in the oven will bake the potatoes until very soft to the touch. For prebaking the pie I find that freezing the shell in the pie plate for 30 minutes first prevents the dough from shrinking.
