The Liquor Alton Brown Swears By For Better Pecan Pie

TV personality, food scientist, and author Alton Brown has spent his career developing better ways to cook with a heavy emphasis on the chemistry behind it. So, if he suggests adding mayonnaise to scrambled eggs to make them extra creamy, you should darn well try it. Likewise, if Brown swears by an ingredient swap for a better pecan pie, you should probably take heed. In this case, he suggests substituting rye whiskey for the classic bourbon, a longstanding addition to this Southern dessert. 

"The way I see it, eating bourbon pecan pie reminds me of eating spiced nuts while drinking an Old Fashioned, so why not make it the way I like to drink it, with rye instead of bourbon, and plenty of bitters to balance the sugar," Brown said in a recent Instagram post. That's right, he not only replaces the bourbon with rye, but adds bitters into the mix for a unique flavor profile that he's dubbed the "Old Fashioned" Pecan Pie.

Alton Brown has had a long-standing love affair with rye whiskey. His favorite cocktail is the Boulevardier, a booze-heavy concoction that combines rye, Campari, and sweet vermouth. He even swaps rye for bourbon in his Manhattans and (obviously) in his old fashioned cocktails as well. An old fashioned, for the uninitiated, is a cocktail that combines a few simple ingredients, including (typically) bourbon, bitters, sugar, and a slice of orange peel.

Swapping rye for bourbon in a pecan pie recipe makes sense, as the dessert can be cloyingly sweet. In general, rye is less sweet than bourbon, but it still delivers complementary spicy notes of vanilla, oak, and caramel. As Brown noted in his Instagram post, bitters also help balance the pie's sweetness. They also add a depth of flavor with notes of cloves, cardamom, and cinnamon. Brown uses a generous amount of Angostura Aromatic Bitters for his pie recipe, but he jokingly claims that the whole pie only makes one serving.