One of the best and time-honored ways of commemorating Thanksgiving with your family is to bake and relish a classic pecan pie. Traditionally, families across the length and breadth of the US have baked pumpkin pies, caramel pear pies, and apple pies for Thanksgiving. However, pecan pies started becoming popular since the onset of the 20th century and nowadays, the dessert is a staple, appearing on dining tables of many American families during Thanksgiving Day.
Are you wondering how to bake a pecan pie and how far ahead you can rustle up the sweetened dessert without sacrificing the just-baked flavor? Ideally, you can prepare the dessert and preserve the dish in a refrigerator at least a month ahead of Thanksgiving.
Baking and Refrigerating Pecan Pie in Advance
If you’re like most other housewives, you could feel that you’re running out of time, especially if you’re planning to prepare a variety of dishes for Thanksgiving. Of course, you can order pecan pie online or buy pecan pie from your local confectionery but there’s nothing like a homemade or home-baked pecan pie. Baking a pumpkin pie or apple pie for the grand occasion can be equally tempting but there’s one big downside of these desserts.
You cannot freeze apple pies or pumpkin pies well in advance for the simple reason that the original texture or consistency is lost in a couple of days. Thankfully, you can make and refrigerate pecan pies for a maximum period of 3 months, and you can bet the desserts would taste as great as they’d have when you baked them.
Grate the filling (of pecan) carefully into a prebaked crust, and allow it to refrigerate till it becomes solid and firm. It will take about 2-3 hours for the filling to fully freeze and turn dense and stiff. Ensure to position the plate (on which you place the pecan pie filling) on the shelf of the fridge’s freezer.
This will ensure that the pie stays even as it refrigerates. After about 3 hour, take the plate out of the freezer shelf and cover it up with a plastic that has been doubly folded. Next wrap a silver foil around the pie plate and put the same back inside the freezer for the entire period before Thanksgiving.
Take the refrigerated pie out of the freezer on D-day, unpack or remove the layers of plastic and foil slowly. Now, allow the pie to bake for at least half an hour more than the guidelines stipulate. Let the pie cool down considerably before you start slicing the dessert.
You can try out a myriad of pecan pie recipes for any celebratory event or occasion. Most of the recipes would require you to precook the filling for the pie and prebake the crust, so you’d need to be patient while preparing pecan pies. But the best thing about making pecan pies is that you can preserve them for a couple of months, and they’d still taste heavenly.
