For Thanksgiving, Two Ways to Make a Pecan Pie Cocktail

A decadent holiday dessert, now in cocktail form.

It’s Thanksgiving again, which means this week’s edition is arriving early, in time for another Thanksgiving cocktail.

In previous years, we’ve made:

• A Thanksgiving Sour — a shaken drink with apple-spice infused brandy. I know people are still making this one two years later. People seem to like it.

• A Pumpkin Spice Old Fashioned — a somewhat more elaborate drink, designed around a custom sous vide syrup, that aims to take the essence of pumpkin pie and recast it as an Old Fashioned. 

This year, we’re going to make a cocktail that tastes like pecan pie. 

Actually, we’re going to make two of them. 

The first is an Old Fashioned variation made entirely of unmodified store-bought ingredients. It requires no advance prep save for buying the relevant bottles. However, it does call for two fairly unusual ingredients, including a slightly difficult to find liqueur and a very particular bottle of bitters that some of you may not be able to obtain before Thanksgiving. But it’s still a good illustration of how to take a drink idea and execute it with off-the-shelf ingredients.

The second is a variation on a flip — a rich, dessert-like class of shaken cocktail that consists of booze, sugar, and a whole raw egg. This version takes a small amount of time and effort. You’ll have to make a custom syrup that you have to start about four hours in advance of making the cocktail. You’ll need a blender and a fine mesh strainer. But it requires no rare ingredients. The relevant bottles of alcohol can be found in most parts of the country. The syrup can be made using items you can purchase at most any grocery store. 

In this newsletter, I like to do more than show how to make a drink. I also like to show what you can learn from any given cocktail or cocktail project. Thus, the two different takes on the pecan pie cocktail illustrate a number of the principles and techniques we’ve looked at in this newsletter: 

• The first drink illustrates the case for bitters maximalism, as well as the way that almost anything can be an Old Fashioned. 

• The second demonstrates why syrups are often the easiest, least expensive way to incorporate novel flavors into cocktails. 

• When looked at together, the two cocktails show how homemade syrups and high-quality flavored liqueurs can sometimes play similar, semi-interchangeable roles in a cocktail. 

Finally, I think this is a fun example of how to take an idea for a cocktail — an inspiration, a memory, a concept, a set of flavors — and translate into multiple different drink formats.

Also, these drinks are pretty tasty, and they will compliment your Thanksgiving — or any other cold-weather holiday gathering — rather well, if I do say so myself. 

Pecan Pie, a Thanksgiving Memoir

Let’s start with the inspiration: pecan pie. This is a little bit personal. But I think holiday cocktails should be a little bit personal. And the memory will help explain what I was trying to accomplish with these drinks. 

Pecan pie is not a Thanksgiving standard in the way that turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie are. But it’s not unusual to find it on Thanksgiving dinner menus, especially in the south. 

As it happens, I grew up in the Panhandle of Florida, which, culturally, is functionally southern Alabama. There was almost always pecan pie at our Thanksgiving celebration. 

But the pecan pie at our table wasn’t something anyone in my family made. Instead, it was the contribution of a family friend who lived just a few blocks down. She and her husband were friends of my parents. 

She was also the piano accompanist for my musical solos — I played tuba, because I was an even bigger dork then than I am now — which meant we sometimes spent hours practicing music together in her music room, and sometimes traveled together to events. I always associate pecan pie with her, and with memories of someone patiently helping me learn to play an instrument that wasn’t really designed for solos. She loved music, in many forms, and she helped bring it into the world. 

She was also a fixture at our family’s Thanksgiving dinner. And her main contribution was always homemade pecan pie — a pecan pie that I remember as being shockingly good on the first bite, and tooth-murderingly sweet on every bite afterwards. By the second bite, I felt queasy. By the third bite, I could practically feel the armies of cavities planting victory flags in my teeth. 

Recalling her pecan pie now, I remain somewhat mystified as to how it could have been so concentrated, so coma-causingly sweet. Even raw sugar isn’t that sweet. I don’t think I ever finished a whole piece. 

Nevertheless, I loved the stuff, because that first bite — before I felt like maybe I would be the first teenager to actually die from a sugar overdose — was incredible.  

So the goal for these cocktails is to make something that’s more approachable, but that captures that rich, delicious, satisfying first-bite sensation in every sip, without tipping into brain-death-by-sugar-overdose sweetness. 

That said, I don’t want to pare it back too much. Cocktails allow for some intensity. They are small-bite products — or small sip, anyway. Most of the drinks we make in this newsletter come in around two to four ounces, which is just the right amount for a high-proof drnk. 

Even ignoring the alcohol consumption issues, you wouldn’t want to sip a tallboy-sized 16-ounce Old Fashioned. It’s too much, just like a whole piece of pecan pie can be too much. But in a two-ounce-and-change portion, an Old Fashioned is just right. So a cocktail makes a good format for rich, intense flavors. 

We’re obviously going to dial back the sweetness to much more manageable levels. But these will be quite rich, somewhat sweet drinks by design, because pecan pie is quite rich and sweet. These cocktails are are designed to be enjoyed as decadent desserts.

What’s In Pecan Pie?

Here’s another relevant personal fact. I’ve never made pecan pie. Not only is my wife the baker in our household, her speciality is homemade pie. Her comparative advantage is so huge that it would be completely insane for me to even attempt a pecan pie, or any other pie for that matter.  

Which means that when I decided to make this cocktail, I had to look up recipes for pecan pie. Not for the techniques and pie-baking nuances, but for the ingredients. Pecan pie obviously involves pecans. But what else makes pecan pie taste like pecan pie?  

A sample recipe from Epicurious includes butter, brown sugar, corn syrup, pure vanilla extract, orange zest, eggs, and, of course, pecans. 

Once I had this list, the trick was to get as much of that as possible into some sort of cocktail, then balance it out.

Let’s take the easy stuff first: brown sugar and corn syrup. Conveniently, they make booze out of both sugar and corn. So we can add sugar and corn elements via the base spirits by using aged rum and bourbon. 

For the bourbon, I went with Elijah Craig, for its medium body and sly mint notes, which I thought would play well with rum in a dessert-like drink. For the rum, I pulled my reliable bottle of El Dorado 8 year, which always tastes like brown sugar to me. I know some of you can’t find El Dorado rum where you live. If you’re having trouble finding it, try another aged rum, like Appleton Estate 8, instead. 

The bigger challenges came from what are arguably the two essential flavors — nuts and vanilla. I tried a bunch of approaches involving Carpano Antica Formula Vermouth, which has a blustery vanilla note, and various medium dry and sweet sherries, all of which come with some level of savory nuttiness. But I had a hard time combining the two in ways I really liked. 

So I had to go a more direct route. 

The vanilla needed to be fairly prominent in the mix. The obvious place to incorporate the vanilla was in the sweetener. As it happens, Giffard, the brand behind one of the best lines of flavored liqueurs (including my favorite banana liqueur) makes a bottle of vanilla liqueur: Liqueur Vanille De Madagascar. It’s delicious, in small portions. It’s also somewhat hard to find. Fortunately, there’s a liquor store about a twenty-minute walk from me that carries the full line of Giffard liqueurs. 

Finally, we needed the most essential element in something that aims to be a pecan pie cocktail — pecans! This is where my devotion to bitters maximalism comes in. Earlier this year, on a whim, I ordered a bottle of Miracle Mile Toasted Pecan Bitters, which, predictably yet amazingly, taste exactly like toasted pecans. As I wrote last month, unusual bottles of bitters aren’t just different ways of adding bitterness or spice to drinks, they are handy ways of adding novel flavors. 

I played around with these elements a bit, making various Old Fashioned-style drinks, and eventually realized I needed two additional elements: First, I needed a bit of Angostura Aromatic Bitters to give the drink a bit of baking spice kick. Second, I needed a hint of a more conventional sweetener in additional to the vanilla liqueur. Since this was a dessert drink, I went with maple syrup. 

Obviously, I’d garnish with an orange peel, in order to get the orange zest into the mix. 

The result was an Old Fashioned that really, seriously, no kidding tastes like Pecan Pie:

Pecan Pie Old Fashioned

• 1 dash Angostura Aromatic Bitters

• 4 dashes Miracle Mile Toasted Pecan Bitters

• 1 tsp maple syrup

• ¼ ounce Giffard Liqueur Vanille De Madagascar

• 1 ounce dark aged rum (El Dorado 8)

• 1 ounce bourbon (Elijah Craig)

INSTRUCTIONS 

1. Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass.

2. Add ice, then stir until chilled, about 8-10 seconds. 

3. Strain into a rocks glass over a single large piece of ice. 

4. Garnish with an orange peel. 

Try it, if you have the ingredients. Or if you don’t have them on hand, just look at it on the page. In one way, this is a somewhat complex drink — a split-base Old Fashioned with two sweeteners and a bitters blend. 

But it’s also very clearly just an Old Fashioned — two ounces of liquor with some sweetener and some bitters to spice up the mix — that shows, once again, how anything can be an Old Fashioned. If you’ve had a basic three-ingredient whiskey Old Fashioned, you should be able to quickly grasp how this drink works. 

It’s decadent, rich, and tasty, and, while it obviously isn’t as cloyingly sweet as my neighbor’s pecan pie, it captures the best parts of the pecan pie experience I remember from my childhood. 

The problem is that it relies on ingredients that you might have a hard time getting, or at the very least might have a hard time getting before Thanksgiving. You can order those Toasted Pecan Bitters online no matter where you live in the country, but they’re going to take a few days to arrive. 

Consider saving this recipe and making it in a week or two. Just like pecan pie, a pecan pie cocktail will serve you well throughout the holiday season.

In the meantime, let’s try making a pecan pie cocktail a totally different way that doesn’t require any difficult-to-find ingredients. 

Which Came First: The Cocktail or the Egg? 

One ingredient I didn’t get into the initial version of the drink was egg. 

Fortuitously, there’s a whole class of wintry, decadent, dessert-like drinks built around whole eggs: the flip. 

I wrote more extensively about flips back in 2020. But the basic idea is that you combine booze, some sort of syrup or other sweetener, and a whole raw egg. 

Cocktail nerds love flips made with sherry. But you can make them with whiskey or rum or even warm beer. It’s a surprisingly versatile format. 

Now, you could just take the ingredients in the Pecan Pie Old Fashioned recipe above, add an egg, increase the volume of maple syrup somewhat to account for the presence of the egg, shake it all together, and make a flip out of it. I’ve done that, and it’s delicious. 

But again, we’re trying to make a version of the pecan pie cocktail that does not require a difficult to find vanilla liqueur or a bottle of bitters that won’t arrive until well after Thanksgiving. We can stick with the rum and the bourbon. 

But the question then is: How are we going to incorporate the vanilla and the nuts? 

And the answer is…we’re going to use vanilla. And nuts. 

Specifically, pure vanilla extract and chopped pecans, both of which you can get at a grocery store. We’ll combine them with demerara sugar and water into a toasted-pecan-vanilla-demerara syrup, which, for the sake of brevity, we’ll call Pecan Pie Syrup. 

This takes a couple of steps, but it’s surprisingly easy to make. Basically, you’re going to make a vanilla-inflected brown sugar syrup in a blender, then you’re going to lightly toast pecans, then you’re going to combine the toasted pecans with the syrup and let them infuse for several hours. At the end, you’ll blend the whole syrup/nuts mix together and strain out the solids. 

Let’s break this down a little more. 

Pecan Pie Syrup

• 25 grams (about ¼ cup) chopped pecans

• 7 grams (about 2 tsp) pure vanilla extract

• 400 grams demerara sugar (or turbinado sugar, if you can’t find demerara)

• 200 grams water

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Start by making vanilla syrup in a blender. Combine demerara sugar, water, and vanilla extract in a blender, then blend on high for two minutes, until completely combined. 

2. Separately, in a small pan, heat the chopped pecans over medium-low heat on a stovetop for about three minutes, until you can smell toasty nuts. Watch the pan carefully and do not burn the nuts! (I burned several batches, and overly toasted blackened nuts ruined those initial syrups.) 

3. Once the chopped nuts are toasted, combine the toasted pecans with the blended vanilla syrup in a medium-sized bowl, then cover the bowl.  

4. Let the covered mixture of syrup and toasted nuts sit on your kitchen counter for about four hours. 

5. After about four hours, dump the entire mixture — nuts and syrup — back into the blender, then blend on high for about a minute, until fully combined. 

6. Now run the blended nut-syrup mixture through a fine mesh strainer to remove any remaining small solids. (There should not be a lot of solids.) You should now have a nutty, vanilla-inflected syrup that is fairly thick but still pours relatively easily through a squeeze bottle.

7. Bottle, label, and store chilled in the fridge. Will last for up to a month. 

Now you have Pecan Pie Syrup, which takes care of the vanilla and the nuts, as well as the sweetener/sugar/syrup part of the flip formula. So if you have the requisite egg, bourbon, rum, and bitters, you are almost ready to make a Pecan Pie Flip. 

Since an orange garnish on a flip would be somewhat unorthodox, we’ll incorporate orange into this drink with a single dash of orange bitters (Regan’s).

And for the garnish, since this is, after all, a holiday dessert drink, we’ll use a cinnamon stick and grated nutmeg. 

Finally, I want to highlight the preparation method for anyone who isn’t used to using eggs in cocktails. This is a shaken cocktail that you’ll need to shake in two distinct stages. 

Pretty much any time you use egg or egg white in a shaken cocktail, you will need to perform a “dry shake” — which is to say, you will need to shake this drink in your cocktail shaker twice: first, with all the ingredients and no ice, to incorporate the egg; second with all the ingredients and ice, to chill and dilute.

Think of it this way: The first shake blends all the ingredients together. The second shake chills and dilutes the egg-booze-sugar mix. 

Pecan Pie Flip

• 1 dash orange bitters (Regan’s)

• 2 dashes Angostura Aromatic Bitters

• ¾ ounce Pecan Pie Syrup (see recipe above)

• 1 ounce dark aged rum (El Dorado 8)

• 1 ounce bourbon (Elijah Craig)

• 1 whole raw egg

• Cinnamon stick and grated nutmeg for garnish 

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Combine all ingredients EXCEPT cinnamon and nutmeg in a cocktail shaker. 

2. Dry shake vigorously for about 10 seconds WITHOUT ice. 

3. Add ice to shaker, then shake a second time, for about 8-10 seconds, to chill and dilute. 

4. Strain mixture into a coupe or cocktail glass.

5. Garnish with fresh grated cinnamon and nutmeg.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This Week In Very Large Dogs