Chocolate Chess Pie Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is chocolate chess pie made of? ›

The custardy filling is made with eggs, sugar, milk, butter, cornmeal, vanilla, and unsweetened chocolate. The filling gets baked into an all-butter pie crust until it's just set in the middle and crackly on top, just like your favorite brownies! What's the cornmeal do in chocolate chess pie?

Compared to other custard-based pastries, the chess pie holds up relatively well at room temperature. Often, it was stored in something called a "pie chest." The word "chest," some say, eventually became "chess." Southern gentlemen liked to enjoy the dessert after dinner while they played chess.

Chess pie is thickened with cornmeal (and sometimes a little bit of all-purpose flour!), whereas buttermilk pies uses only all-purpose flour. Many buttermilk recipes will play up the tartness, with added lemon juice and zest, giving it a pleasant citrus flavor.

What is the Difference Between a Sugar Cream Pie and Custard or Chess Pie? Chess pies and custard pies are mixed and poured right into the pie crust, and they contain eggs. A sugar cream pie is made without eggs, and the filling is usually prepared on the stovetop, reducing the overall baking time.

If you overbake it, it takes on a very strong eggy flavor and can actually be watery due to the overcooked eggs. So watch the pie carefully towards the end of baking and pull it from the oven when it just sets.

What is Chess Pie? Well this pie has the consistency of a pecan pie without the pecans, but tastes more akin to a custard pie, but it is not custard. It is very similar to buttermilk pie and in some parts of the country; they refer to this as a sugar pie.

Pie lore offers two explanations for its unusual name. The simple one is that flies get stuck in the sticky-sweet molasses, so bakers must shoo them away. The second explanation is that the pie was named after the 19th-century “Shoofly” brand of molasses.

Crack Pie — the trademarked name for the chain's buttery, sugary pie — will now become Milk Bar Pie. The name was a reference to crack cocaine — the gag being that the pie was just as addictive as the drug.

Name change

Some food writers and others have criticized naming foods including Crack Pie after addictive substances as insensitive and offensive. In May 2019, Devra First of the Boston Globe criticized the name in a column for making light of addiction by alluding to the addictiveness of crack cocaine.

You can also think of pecan pie as an extension of chess pie, with brown sugar and corn syrup taking the place of granulated sugar and pecans adding nuttiness and crunch. And then there is Kentucky bourbon and walnut pie (aka Derby pie), which adds Bourbon, chocolate, and walnuts to the chess pie formula.

Is chess pie the same as shoofly pie? ›

On a serious note, Shoofly pie is considered a custard type in the same “pie family” as pecan and Chess pie (“jus pie”). Chess pie is a Southern specialty similar to pecan but without the nuts. Shoofly is famous in Pennsylvania Dutch country and is thickened with a streusel to more closely resemble cake.

Its closest relative is probably the pecan pie, because it also uses corn syrup, but the molasses and crumbs of the shoo-fly pie give it a dark, sticky, sweet flavor, completely unlike that of a nut or fruit pie.

It's made with sugar, a little cornstarch, whole milk, egg yolks, vanilla, butter, and the star of the show, bittersweet chocolate. You make the filling on your stovetop and pour it into the baked (and cooled) pie crust. Then it goes into the fridge to set up.

Ingredients: Apples (apples, Ascorbic Acid, Salt, Citric Acid), Enriched Flour (bleached Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Sugar, Palm Oil, Water, Apple Juice Concentrate, Modified Food Starch, Invert Syrup, Contains 2% Or Less: Yeast, Salt, Cinnamon, Sunflower Lecithin, ...

A choco pie is a snack cake consisting of two small round layers of cake with marshmallow filling and a chocolate covering. The term originated in America but is now also used widely in South Korea, Japan, and its exports, and many other countries as either a brand name or a generic term.