Creole Cream Cheese Chess Pie

A recipe from the High Hat in New Orleans.

Makes two 10-inch pies

2 lbs. Creole cream cheese at room temperature

9 eggs

3 + 1/2 cups sugar

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1/2 stick butter, melted

2 partially baked 10" pie crusts

Preheat oven to 300ºF. Whip eggs, sugar, vanilla extract and butter in stand mixer until well incorporated. Add in room temperature cream cheese and mix until smooth. Pour into two partially pre-baked pie crusts. Bake the pies for 60 minutes, rotating halfway through, until set in the middle. Let cool before serving.

Test Kitchen Analysis

Roll out your best Southern drawl when making this dessert. Chess pie is celebrated across the South, and South Louisianans have long relished creole cream cheese, a farmhouse delicacy that seems to have arrived with New Orleans' earliest French settlers.

The simplicity of this recipe caught the attention of the Country Roads Cooks, and the fact that it's shareable. If there's anything better than freshly-baked pie, it's two freshly-baked pies. Might as well make enough to bring to a neighbor.

We used creole cream cheese from Chef John Folse's Bittersweet Plantation Dairy and chuckled when we read on the dairy's Web site: "best eaten with a sprinkle of sugar." This recipe suggests that creole cream cheese is best eaten with a sprinkle and then some—over three cups of sugar, in fact, and a good amount of butter, too.

Halfway through the hour-long baking time, when it was time to rotate the pies, the mixture was still very liquidy; but when the full hour had passed, our two pies were set and ready to be pulled from the oven. We passed out a few slices after the requisite cooling period and dove our spoons into the sweet Southern dessert.

Good thing we made two! The first pie quickly became a small fraction of its former self as we tasted with abandon, for testing purposes, of course. Despite the absence of lemon in this recipe, the pie does have a hint of tangy tartness, which must come from the faint zing of creole cream cheese. It provides a nice balance to this sugary confection. Give this recipe a go and let us know how it turns out!