Food & Drink

Shoofly Pie with Sorghum

Makes one 10-inch pie

A Southern take on the Amish country classic

October 11, 2018

Photo: Andrew Thomas Lee

“When I first moved to the Washington, D.C. area, I spent weekends taking road trips to explore the mid-Atlantic region, including Pennsylvania’s Amish country,” says Brian Noyes, founder of Red Truck Bakery in Marshall, Virginia, and author of the new Red Truck Bakery Cookbook. “I’d return home with a bag of sweet smoked bologna and at least two molasses-rich, crumb-topped shoofly pies.”

“A couple of years ago, a customer asked if we made shoofly pie at the Red Truck,” he says. “We didn’t, but it inspired me to create one. Sweetened with a mellower sorghum syrup, adorned with broken-up pieces of cakes, and topped with smoked sugar, it’s a little lighter than its Keystone State cousin.”

Ingredients

For the Crust
- 1 store-bought crust
For the Crumb topping
- ¾ cup unbleached all-purpose flour, sifted
- ¼ cup packed dark brown sugar
- 4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter, chilled and cubed
- ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1 cup crumbled pound cake
For the Filling
- 2 cups loosely packed crumbled pound cake
- ¾ cup sorghum syrup
- ¼ cup honey
- ½ teaspoon baking soda
- ½ cup boiling water
- 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
- 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
- 2 large eggs, at room temperature
- ¼ cup packed light brown sugar
- ¼ cup smoked sugar (Noyes recommends Bourbon Barrel Foods) or turbinado sugar
- 1½ teaspoons orange zest
- 1 teaspoon lemon zest
- ¼ teaspoon kosher salt

Preparation

Preheat the oven to 425°F. Place a raised wire rack inside a rimmed baking sheet.

Roll out the pie dough into a 13-inch round, fit it into a 10-inch pie pan, trim, and crimp the edges.

Make the crumb topping: In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the flour, dark brown sugar, butter, and cinnamon and mix on low speed, just until pea-sized lumps form. Avoid overmixing; the topping will quickly turn into an unusable paste. With the mixer running on low speed, mix in the crumbled cake pieces until just combined.

Make the filling: Evenly scatter the crumbled cake pieces over the crust.

In a large bowl, combine the sorghum syrup, honey, and baking soda. Pour in the boiling water; whisk until combined (it will foam up, then subside). Whisk in the melted butter and vanilla. Add the eggs one at a time, whisking until well mixed after each addition. Add the light brown sugar, smoked sugar, orange zest, lemon zest, and salt and mix well. Pour the mixture over the cake chunks in the pie shell, making sure not to fill it past the bottom of the crimped edges.

Evenly sprinkle the crumb topping over the filling. Carefully place the pie on the prepared baking sheet. Bake for 15 minutes, then reduce the oven temperature to 350°F and turn the pie. Bake for 20 minutes more, until the filling is firm and golden. Let cool on a raised wire rack.

Recipe reprinted from Red Truck Bakery Cookbook: Gold-Standard Recipes from America’s Favorite Rural Bakery. Copyright © 2018 by Brian Noyes. Photographs copyright © 2018 by Andrew Thomas Lee. Published by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

tags:

Shoofly Pie with Sorghum

Ingredients

For the Crust

For the Crumb topping

For the Filling

Preparation

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