Tennessee · Dessert
Chess Pie
- Intermediate
- 75 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, acid holding everything up to the light, trailing gentle sweetness.
Ingredients
- 1 blind-baked 23cm pie shell (all-butter, edges crimped high, the filling rises then settles)
- 200g sugar + 60g brown sugar
- 4 eggs; 120g melted butter; 60ml buttermilk
- 1 tbsp fine cornmeal + 1 tsp flour, the signature grit; 1 tbsp vinegar + 1 tsp vanilla
- Nothing fancy; the whole pie costs a dollar in ingredients, which is the point
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · egg
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Whisk sugars, eggs, butter, buttermilk smooth; whisk in cornmeal, flour, vinegar, vanilla.
- Pour into the warm blind-baked shell.
- Bake 170°C, 40–45 min: the top forms its famous crackled sugar skin; the center should still shimmy slightly. 45 min
- Cool COMPLETELY: hours; chess pie sets on the counter, not in the oven. Slice thin; it is sweeter than it looks and it looks sweet.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Pie crust & blind baking 29 recipes
- The shell goes into the oven cold and the oven is fully up to heat, so the structure sets before the fat has time to melt out of it.
- Lined and weighted right into the corners rather than heaped in the middle, so the sides are held against the tin as the fat softens.
- Docked where it is not meant to puff, and the base stays flat rather than lifting into a dome under its own steam.
- The weights come out and the base gets dry heat of its own before anything wet arrives. Pale and damp is not baked, and a filling will not finish it.
- The edges are set and coloured and the shell releases from the tin rather than gripping it.
Where it goes wrong It went in warm, or the weights only filled the middle. The sides slump down the tin before the pastry sets, so the case is shallower than it should be, the filling overflows it, and the base is still raw underneath: the soggy bottom, arrived at three ways at once.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Sauternes
- Also Right
- Demi-sec Champagne
- From the Taps
- Belgian tripel
- Zero-Proof
- Jasmine tea
The sweetness rule is absolute: the pour must be sweeter than the plate, and acid keeps it from cloying.
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