Crack Pie

I bought a few cookbooks recently, all of which were featured in Food52's The Piglet Tournament of Cookbooks. Two of the cookbooks I bought focus on natural whole foods, and the other, Momofuku Milk Bar is kind of the opposite. It's a dessert cookbook and revels in butter, sugar, cream and weird ingredients like glucose, milk powder and corn powder.

The most famous offering at the Milk Bar is Crack Pie. It is so famous they even trademarked the name. In fact, the little trademark signs in the book start to get a little irritating, like a shirt tag that is itchy or something.

I decided I would make crack pie for the big party next weekend. By the way, Crack pie is basically old-fashioned chess pie with a few tweaks. I've been wanting to make it in the Joy of Cooking for a while now but never have.

It's been taking me freaking forever to make the pie. The first step is to make a giant oatmeal cookie that you then crumble up to make a oat cookie crumb crust. I did this over a week ago, but then used some of the crumbles to make a peach pie. Not tto bad. Then I made a double batch of the cookie. But when it came time to crumble it up in the food processor I was bad. I turned it on and walked a way and promptly was distracted by the baby. Next thing you know I have oat cookie butter. I baked up some of that into cookies which were kind of good. They were like a shortbread.

Finally I made the cookie again, and made it into crumbs. I made the filling a few nights ago. It takes 8 egg yolks among other things. Crack pie also uses corn powder, which you make by buying freeze-dried corn (Just Corn) and blitzing it into a fine powder. I also have been using this corn powder in my vegetarian tamales as well for added flavor. I never bought Just Corn before but it is really good. I actually found myself snacking on the corn kernels and they are incredibly sweet.  You can get it on Amazon or Whole Foods. (The Just Tomatoes website charges an arm and a leg for shipping FYI -- why don't they offer USPS priority mail?).

Anyway--today was the day I baked the crack pie(s). Each recipe makes 2 pies, FYI. Everything is fussy about this recipe as far as I can tell. You bake the pies for 15 minutes at 350, then you open the oven and lower the temp to 325. You are supposed to keep the oven door open till the temperature is lowered. I just kept it open till I heard the oven click on again, which I took to mean it had cooled off. Also, you don't really want to keep an oven open when you have a baby walking around the house.

My crack pies took forever to cook. I think it has to do with the altitude, but also I started with refrigerated filling -- if I make it again I will let it warm up to room temperature first. I started getting worried that the liquid would evaporate off so at one point I covered them loosely with foil. My high altitude baking cookbook has this horror story about pecan pie boiling over in the oven at 10,000 feet because there is too much sugar and not enough liquid. But I am only at 7300 feet but still, I was getting a little worried. As a final step, you take the not fully cooked pies out of the oven, cool, then freeze for 3 hours. Finally I just took them out after having them in the oven for probably two to three times as long as the recipe stated.

I stole a slice out of one of the pies and it's pretty good. Super sweet. Would go great with some strong black coffee. If you have a sweet tooth you will probably like this one...Here is the recipe at Bon Appetit.