Can We Make a Southern Favorite Healthy? Yes, We Pecan!

By: Katie Kadue | May 13 2010
Posted in San Francisco Bay Area - Cook It - San Francisco

I’m nuts about nuts: California almonds, Oregon filberts, black walnuts from the Midwest. But whenever I want to get back to my Southern roots, I reach for Mississippi-grown pecans, preferably from my great-aunt’s ancient tree. Even in snowy Minnesota, my grandmother always has a freezer full of her sister’s raw shelled nuts. She hasn’t lived in the South since 1945, but she’s kept alive the family recipe for pecan pie – as well as her distinctive Southern drawl (that’s PEE-kahn, y’all).

Photo: Katie Kadue

Grandma’s recipe calls for two kinds of corn syrup, light and dark, neither of which I keep in the pantry (turns out I’m not a real Southerner). As much as I respect tradition, and as many slices of that pie I scarfed as a kid, I’m not sure my Berkeley-biased taste buds could handle all that treacle. So in a quest to marry the flavors of my heritage with the consciousness of California, I came across this recipe for a modified (okay, entirely different) take on the Southern classic. (For more pecanniness, replace half the almonds with pecans in the crust. Or do what my grandma does, and load the top with extra chopped nuts.)

It’s fun to fool guests with healthy treats that taste just as decadent as traditional versions, and it’s nice when vegans can get a piece of the pie, but I admit raw recipes like this don’t always seem worth the work. When I’ve got pecans on the brain, I usually just do this: remove the pit from a Medjool date, replace with a pecan, and savor with Southern-style slowness.

Are you looking for an easy, healthy version of a traditional treat? Let us know – we promise we won’t tell your grandma that you’re ruining her recipe.