Pecan and Pumpkin Double-Crusted Pie

Pie meets pasticciotto

Over the summer, I spent five beautiful days in Puglia, where I made sure to stop at the oldest bakery in Italy. There I tried my first pasticciotto, a pastry invented at their bakery in the 19th Century. Pasticciotti are individual, pot-bellied oval pies with a crumbly and tender outer pastry case and inside stuffed full of pastry cream. They are simply the cutest. So, despite it being July, I knew upon tasting them that I would make a Thanksgiving pie recipe inspired by them – I just wasn’t sure how…

Fast forward to early October, when testing began, and I went through many trials. I knew from the start that I wanted it to be a pecan pie, because pecan pie is my favorite of all the Thanksgiving pies (apple is indeed the apple of my eye, you can find my recipe here–baking apple pies with my late grandmother was my introduction to baking–but pecan is my favorite to eat). I love it so much that I have even taught a couple of pecan-pie-making classes and had a handful of people reach out saying that their family now requests that specific recipe every year.

With that being said, that pecan pie recipe is hard to execute (hence the classes), and it’s sweet. So this year, I set off to make it easier and temper the sweetness a bit. I won’t bore you with the details, but I got there and I’m so happy with the results.

The pecan filling begins with a toffee sauce that adds some deep caramel notes, tempering the sweetness. It also creates a lovely, soft-set sticky-gooey caramel texture. I had originally planned on offsetting the sweetness of the pecan pie even further with a layer of dark chocolate pastry cream, but all those trials failed horribly (chocolate is very expensive right now, so I was trying to use cocoa powder, which wasn’t working).

I went back to the drawing board, flipped through my vintage cookbooks, and saw the two-tone holiday pie above. I was inspired to attempt a pumpkin topping, and it worked on the first trial.

I topped the pecan filling with a pastry cream made from pumpkin puree, harkening back to that soft, custardy pasticciotto filling. This filling recipe is not for a pumpkin pie. It is very much a pumpkin-flavored pastry cream that’s just barely sweetened. It’s also worth noting that the pecan filling does take on a slightly more dominant role here, and the pumpkin provides the supporting notes of spice and earthy-ness, and the lovely, creamy pasticciotto texture.

There is so much to love about this recipe:
1. The pastry case is more like a sablé dough, so it is far more forgiving than a pie crust (and requires no decorative crimping). And there is no blind baking in this recipe (a big bonus in my book).
2. Since this pecan pumpkin pie is double-crusted with a pumpkin layer on top, it tastes less sweet than a standard pecan pie, meaning more balanced bites.
3. This pie has so much texture. There’s the crumbly-buttery pastry case, snappy pecans, chewy caramel-y toffee filling, custardy spiced pastry cream, and fluffy whipped cream on top.
4. Aesthetically, the final outcome truly looks like the pasticciotto-turned-pie of my dreams.

P.S. If you want to make a smaller version of this pie, you can halve the recipe and bake it in one of these gratin dishes for a more classic, oval, pasticciotti-inspired experience (this is my preferred way to bake this).

P.P.S. You have 2 options for pumpkin quantities: If you’re not a huge pumpkin lover, you can make the smaller batch. However, if you want the pumpkin and pecan flavors to take on more equal footing, I suggest the larger batch. See the different ingredient quantities below.