Home, Cooking: Sweet Potato Pie with Graham Cracker Crust

Every year, in mid-November, my cousins group chat lights up with requests for everyone’s favorite pie crust. This is a good ritual. As kids, we spent Thanksgiving together, but now we’re far-flung, and it’s a rare, late November that sees us around the same table. It’s good to remember, as a group, the dishes we loved (and hated — apologies to my grandmother’s classic mid-century Jell-O mold with celery and pecans!) when we were young. 

But I never have a good answer to the pie question. (Neither, to be fair, do my other cousins, one of whom simply texted the group a link to a Pillsbury frozen packaged crust this year.) I am not light-handed enough to be good at the process of making flour pie crust, and I’ll be honest: I don’t love to eat the results. It always gets stiff and crunchy on the sides, and mushy on the bottom. At least it does when I make it! 

As a consequence, for years I inflicted a pumpkin pie with graham cracker crust, made from a recipe from New York’s City Bakery, on my Thanksgiving gathering. But I like sweet potato more than pumpkin, so I decided to put together something new this year. I bought a little basket of knobby, fresh sweet potatoes at the farmers market, from Sassafras Farm. I decided I’d combine that graham cracker crust recipe with a sweet potato pie filling from Cooks Illustrated. I’d make it in a tart pan, to add some visual interest in the dessert lineup. 

I also wanted to try my new favorite trick, which may be old hat to some, but came to my attention only recently, after I tried a mind-blowing chocolate cake with brown butter frosting from Bon Appetit. That recipe has you brown nonfat dry milk powder in butter, and the results are unlike any other frosting I’ve ever had. After I brought that cake to a party, a friend volunteered that putting nonfat dry milk powder in any baked good gives it a subtle, almost unnoticeable richness. I Googled it and saw that everyone’s been doing this. I had a bunch of packets left over, from the generous amount you get when you buy a Kroger-brand box. So I put some in this pie’s graham cracker crust.

It worked so well! You get a bite of crust that’s hyper-crunchy, savory, and toasty, a perfect contrast to the smooth, complex sweetness of the sweet potato filling. Sometimes (please forgive me) when I’m eating standard pumpkin pie, I get tired of the experience before the slice is gone. Done this way, I wanted a second piece. 

Sweet Potato Pie in a Graham Cracker Crust
(adapted from City Bakery and Cooks Illustrated)

For the crust: 
8 or 9 graham crackers
3 tbsp. flour
½ cup (1 stick) butter
½–1 tbsp. nonfat dry milk powder

For the filling:
2 pounds sweet potatoes (about 5 medium)
2 tbsp unsalted butter
3 large eggs
2 egg yolks
1 cup granulated sugar
½ tsp nutmeg
¼ tsp table salt
2–3 tbsp bourbon
1 tsp vanilla extract
⅔ cup whole milk

1. Blitz the graham crackers in a food processor to make fine crumbs. (Note: I tend to make crumbs more than I need for a recipe, to save my future self the work. They freeze well. Next month, my extras will become Hello Dollies.) 
2. Brown the ½ cup butter, then let it cool slightly. 
3. Mix up the crust: Put the graham cracker crumbs, flour, and nonfat dry milk powder in a medium bowl, and whisk til combined. Pour the cooled browned butter into a hole in the middle of the dry ingredients. Whisk to mix together well. 
4. Dump your delicious graham cracker sludge into a 9” tart pan or pie pan. Press the mix out and up the sides. (At first it will look like there isn’t enough, but there is!) Put the prepared crust into the fridge for ten minutes, while you get the filling ready.
   (Note: At this point you could freeze the assembled crust for up to a few months, well-wrapped. Let it get back to room temperature before proceeding.)
5. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. 
6. Cook the sweet potatoes. Cooks Illustrated recommends doing this in a microwave. Prick them with a fork and put them on a double layer of paper towels. Cook at full power 5 minutes, then flip over and cook 5 minutes more. You can also bake them, if you would rather (roast, with pricked skins and swathed in foil, at 425 degrees, for 45-50 minutes) but the microwave works fine and takes less fuss.
7. Cool the potatoes for 10 minutes, then cut them in half and scoop their flesh into a bowl. Add the 2 tbsp. butter and mash until it disappears into the hot potatoes. Here you can either just mash the potatoes with a fork or wooden spoon until they’re relatively smooth (the Cooks Illustrated recommendation), or use a food mill to make them totally smooth (I did this, out of dislike for lumps in my pie). 
8. Make the filling: In a medium bowl, using a big whisk, combine eggs, yolks, sugar, nutmeg, salt, bourbon, vanilla and milk. Add sweet potato mixture gently.
9. Pour filling into prepared crust. Put tart or pie pan on a baking sheet and cook in preheated oven for 45 minutes or until the filling is set around the edges. (The middle will still be slightly soft.) Cool for about 2 hours before eating, with the best whipped cream a can has to offer.