Low-Carb Black Walnut Pie

Although I have mentioned black walnuts before (more than once), I'm not sure I've ever commented on the flavor.  It's good and quite unlike English walnuts, which are more commonly available commercially.  Black walnuts are strong and it's probably accurate to call it an acquired taste.  My first exposure wasn't very positive, but I have grown to like them a lot.

Black walnut pie is a great way to eat them, and I have a few other recipes that use black wanuts, too.  The basic recipe is something like this:

1 cup sugar (white, brown, or a mix)
1 cup corn syrup or sorghum
1 tsp vanilla
3 eggs, beaten
2 tbsp butter, melted
1 c nuts (all black or can mix 50/50 black/English)
1/8 tsp salt

Mix, pour into a pie shell, bake 10 minutes at 400, then at 350 for another 40 minutes.

That's pretty high in carbs, mostly because of the sweeteners.  Here's an alternate (I developed it for someone who's diabetic):

3/4 cup brown sugar Whey Low (aka Whey Low Gold)
1/2 cup Whey Low Type D
1/4 cup butter (4 tbsp)
3 eggs
1 tbsp vanilla
1 cup nuts
1/8 tsp salt

Bake at 350 for 30-40 minutes.

For the shell (rolled or swaged):

1 cup whole wheat flour (could also use rye)
1/4 cup oil, butter, or lard
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup water (if rolling crust out; otherwise not needed)

I don't know what the carb content per slice is.  For the crust, the total net carbs are 76 grams (72 grams with rye); this is less than 10 grams per slice. The black walnuts have about 4 net grams of carbs per cup.  The Whey Low adds some carbs.  The carb impact is substantially lower than with sugar. The Type D is somewhat lower than the regular granulated Whey Low according to this analysis on the Whey Low site.  One cup of sugar has about 200 grams of carbs; 1.25 cups would have 250 grams--meaning the per-slice carbs from the sugar would be 31.25 grams (if sugar was used).  If the Whey Low impact is overall 18% of that, it would be pretty low per slice.

As noted previously, 100% whole wheat does not hold together well when rolling out a crust.  One solution is to add some white flour, but that a little to the carb content (88 grams per cup for white versus 76 for whole wheat).  Another approach is to swage the crust.  Swaging is probably not the best term, but basically it's just a process of dumping the flour mixed with the fat and other ingredients into the plate as clumpy powder, then forming it to the bottom and sides.  Maybe cold sintering would be a better term.  At any rate, it works, albeit at the cost of making a fairly friable and fragile crust.

So that's what I did.  I used sunflower oil and mixed it well, then formed the crust to the plate.  After that, I mixed the filling ingredients, adding the nuts last, and dumped them into the pie shell.

While this does not make for an award winning crust, it works decently well.  I put the pie in the oven and the result looked pretty typical for a black walnut pie, albeit somewhat compressed (the volume of sweeteners was somewhat lower than normal, so as it cooled it compressed a bit--still, it was decent and didn't look at all bad--the picture below is fresh out of the oven).

 

The flavor was fine.  Since I didn't bake a more-traditional pie at the same time, I couldn't do a side-by-side comparison but it was very tasty and not recognizably different.  My friend's blood glucose readings after eating a slice were comparable to what he sees otherwise, meaning it didn't cause a spike.

Nut pies have better low-carb potential because the main ingredient of the filling is essentially carb-free, unlike fruit pies.  It may be worth investigating if \dessert options that have a lower carb load are desirable.