Chocolate Pecan Pie

Ingredients

• 1 unbaked 9-inch pie crust (store-bought or homemade)
• 1 1/2 cups pecan halves
• 1/2 cup chocolate chips
• 1 cup corn syrup
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 3 tbsp melted butter, 1 tsp vanilla extract

Method

1. Preheat oven to 350°F (177°C). Fit the crust into a 9-inch pie dish and crimp the edges.
2. Whisk the filling ingredients together in a large bowl until smooth.
3. Pour the filling into the crust.
4. Bake for 50–60 minutes, until the edges are set and the center jiggles only slightly when the pan is nudged.
5. Cool completely on a wire rack, then refrigerate at least 2 hours before slicing.

The Tale of Chocolate Pecan Pie

Story updated September 15, 2026

Chocolate pecan pie sits at the crossroads of two beloved American desserts. Classic pecan pie had already become a Southern staple by the early twentieth century, its corn-syrup filling popularized in part by Karo's canny 1930s marketing campaign. Meanwhile, at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, Ruth Wakefield chopped up a bar of semisweet chocolate to add to her cookie dough in the 1930s, inventing the chocolate chip cookie; Nestlé began selling ready-made morsels in 1939, and a 'Toll House pie'—essentially cookie batter baked in a crust—followed. Somewhere in mid-twentieth-century home kitchens, the two traditions merged: bakers began scattering chocolate chips into their pecan pie filling, marrying the buttery, toasted flavor of pecans with pools of melted chocolate. There's no single credited inventor; it reads as one of those quiet, undocumented improvements that spread through family recipe boxes and church cookbooks rather than any single kitchen.