mmmmm…Pie

I always have room for more of Mom’s pumpkin pie. I’d never baked a pumpkin pie, let alone one from real pumpkins, and I always wanted to try it when I saw pie pumpkins stacked up in stores. As I went through the checkout at the grocery store, the cashier looked at my selections and said, “Making pumpkin pie from scratch? It’s a curse, once you do it this way, you’ll never want to do it any other way again!” I knew I was in for a treat.

I like to bake as much as I like to cook, but baking offers a unique opportunity: baking requires precision. The measurements, proportions, and temperatures have to be right or you don’t get what you expect. That means I can get a recipe from Mom and hope to duplicate her results.

Mom makes her pie using a brand of canned pumpkin called Lake Shore Pumpkin that’s solid pack pumpkin, not pie filling. It is distributed out of Western New York, so it’s readily available in Northwest Pennsylvania, but alas, like Yuengling beer, it’s not to be found in Northeast Ohio, so Mom gave me a can. Lake Shore comes with a handy recipe right on the side. I also bought several pie pumpkins and set out to find a good recipe.

Online searches resulted in many recipes, all similar, using canned pumpkin. The few that I found that specified pie pumpkins varied only slightly. I narrowed my selections to two recipes and went to work.

Cooking the pumpkins is simple: cut them in half, remove the seeds (you can roast the seeds just like you would with your jack-o-lantern field pumpkin)  and strings and place them on a baking sheet cut side down. Bake at 350 F until fork tender, about an hour, hour-and-a-half. Once it has cooled, scrape the pumpkin from the skin using a spoon or ice cream scoop and puree it until smooth. After you remove the pumpkin, raise your oven temp to 400 F to prepare for baking the pies. Your puree can be used in recipes calling for canned pumpkin or pureed winter squash. You can also boil or microwave the pumpkin, but that just seems wrong to me. Bake them. While you’re waiting you can watch a couple of episodes of a good cooking show.

Baking tip:Don’t turn the oven up to your required baking temp until you put your to-be-baked item in the oven

The pies will need to bake at 425 F for 15 minutes, then for another 45-55 minutes at 350 F, until a knife or toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Here’s a good baking tip: Don’t turn the oven up to your required baking temp until you put your to-be-baked item in the oven. Ovens cycle to maintain the set temperature. If you set it to 425, you may catch your oven in mid-cycle, plus you will lose 10-25 degrees when you open the door, so by the time you put the pies in it may not cycle up to 425 for several minutes. By turning the temp up when you put your items in, you force the cycle, providing a kick start to baking at the beginning by heating up to the proper temp quickly. Watch your oven thermometer; you’d be surprised how much heat you lose by simply opening the door for a few seconds.

Here’s where reading the recipe, I mean really reading it, comes in handy. The first recipe I tried had the following ingredients:

I thought, “Hey, looks good to me!” And I forged ahead. But there’s a glaring omission in the recipe: sugar! As I reviewed my searches, many of the fresh puree recipes omit sugar. Those must be some sugary pumpkins! My pies were not sugary, maybe it was the pumpkins, I don’t know, I may have to try it again with different pumpkins. The mixture was pale, even when cooked and it was not sweet at all, in fact, it was pretty disgusting. While I wouldn’t use this recipe again for pie, with less salt and maybe a dash of vanilla, it would make a pretty good pumpkin custard. This demonstrates one of the things I love about cooking: you can usually eat your mistakes.

Back to the kitchen with recipe #2:

This filling mixture turned out wonderfully. It was darker and richer in color and the addition of clove and allspice placed this filling firmly in the grasp of the sense and taste memory that held Mom’s pie. (I learned something about allspice while reading The Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook: Allspice is not a mixture of spices. It is the dried fruit of the Pimenta dioica plant. The fruit is picked when it is green and unripe, and traditionally sun dried then ground. When dry they are brown and look like large brown peppercorns.) I made two of these and took one to Mom’s for Thanksgiving. It was a hit!

I also tried a recipe for sour cream pumpkin pie that Renée got from Readerville:

As expected, this pie turned out darker and heavier than the standard pumpkin recipe. The sour cream and brown sugar added to its rich, luxurious flavor. The filling was much thicker and required a little coaxing to fill out the edges when poured into the crust. This pie comes with a Ginger Whipped Cream topping consisting of

Whip this mixture until stiff and refrigerate it covered until ready to serve.

Some tips for choosing and using fresh pumpkin:

These pies were so easy to make, and turned out so deliciously, that I wonder why more people don’t use real pumpkins. The extra time to prepare the pumpkin puree was well worth the effort and the will be further rewarded with pumpkin soups, breads, muffins…all made from fresh pumpkin puree.

Tagged as: allspice, brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves, Cream, eggs, evaporated milk, fresh pumpkin, ginger, kosher salt, Lakeshore Pumpkin, nutmeg, Pumpkin pie, pumpkin pie spice, sour cream, Sugar, Whipped cream, Yuengling