Alton Brown's Secret Ingredient For His Classic Pecan Pie

If there's one dessert most associated with the holidays, it's pie. There's autumnal, cozy apple pie filled with warming spices, creamy pumpkin pie with notes of nutmeg and cloves, and, of course, sweet and sticky pecan pie with its sugary, gooey filling and added crunch from the nuts, to name just a few. 

If it's the latter that you love, Alton Brown has a simple tip for making the perfect pecan pie: Add 1 tablespoon of rye whiskey to your standard 9-inch pie. This booze is made from a blend of different grains, but to be called rye whiskey, it has to include 51% rye grain. This whiskey is quite strong and has an ABV of at least 40%. When you add it to your dessert, it serves as a flavor enhancer, helping bring out subtleties in your treat and giving it a more complex feel.

Brown's pecan pie is not only delicious because of its rye whiskey. He treats it like an old fashioned, adding just half a teaspoon of Angostura cocktail bitters to help create even more balance in a treat that tends to be cloying. It's so good, why save it for the holidays?

If adding whiskey to your pecan pie sounds odd, consider that there are quite a few recipes for bourbon pecan pie, from which Alton Brown draws inspiration. He notes on Instagram, "The way I see it, eating bourbon pecan pie reminds me of eating spiced nuts while drinking an [old fashioned], so why not make it the way I like to drink it, with rye instead of bourbon and plenty of bitters to balance the sugar."

Rye whiskey is less sweet than bourbon, so using it balances the pie and prevents it from being too sweet. It also tends to have a spicy kick to it as well as a noticeably full-bodied feel. You'll also find that it's fairly dry, so there aren't sweet notes that linger on the tongue. Those aspects help to create balance in your pie against the stickiness of the corn syrup filling. At the same time, rye whiskey has complex flavors like oak, vanilla, and stone fruit, depending on how long and in what type of barrels it's aged. All those notes can come out in your pie and pair well with the warm flavors of the season and the caramel and vanilla touches in the treat.

Another thing to note about adding rye whiskey to your pie is that you don't have to worry about it being a dish designed just for adults. The alcohol will cook off when your pie is in the oven, leaving you with a booze-free dessert enhanced with added flavor.

Once you've added your rye whiskey to the pie, don't stop there. You can also experiment with other additions and upgrades to enhance the dessert. For one thing, you could make a chocolate pecan pie, incorporating cocoa notes into your treat. This can work particularly well with a chocolate rye whiskey, strengthening the chocolatey flavors while keeping that balance of bitters.

Another option could be to take advantage of the fact that the rye helps to remove the cloying flavor from your dessert and add some butterscotch flavors to the pecan pie. Butterscotch is a fairly sweet flavor, and while it can add caramelly, buttery notes to your dessert, the rye whiskey can help provide balance. You can also look for a whiskey with extra strong spicy notes or a bit more bite, such as a cinnamon rye whiskey, to further offset the sweetness. Or make a brown butter pecan pie, enhancing the caramel and vanilla notes in the dessert, particularly if your rye has vanilla notes as well.