This weekend was Thanksgiving for my Canadian friends and family. I thought I’d challenge myself a little and spent Sunday afternoon attempting to bake a pumpkin pie. How were the results? I was pleased, especially for a first attempt.

The recipes I followed for both filling and crust are easy to read and pretty straightforward. I still ran into a few gotchas, though; I’ll be noting those as I can.

I knew already that pumpkins for pies and for jack-o-lanterns are not the same, but it’s more than just size differences. A pie pumpkin is drier and sweeter. You end up adding a lot of sugar to the filling anyways, but the dryness is important if you don’t want it being too runny. Anyhow, this lovely pumpkin that I used was just $3.99 from Amazon Fresh.

The first thing is to cut it up, remove the stem, and either steam or bake the the pieces. The directions suggested microwaving, for maximum energy savings, so that’s what I went with. I covered the bowl with saran-wrap and put it in for 15 minutes.

Fifteen minutes turned out to be plenty. The pumpkin innards were thoroughly softened, and I was able to scoop the chunks out into a separate container.

The directions at this point were to puree the cooked pumpkin. I had it all in the tupperware tub ready to do that with a milkshake blender, but then realised… we don’t have one. So I had to transfer it back to the mixing bowl and use the hand-mixer. Still made a bit of a mess, but a passable puree was achieved. Also, the final output of the pumpkin was nearly 6 cups of pumpkin glop, double the 3 cups suggested by the directions as being “normal.”

Ah yes, the crust. Easily the part of this whole endeavour that I was most nervous about. I made it easy for myself by purchasing real clog-your-veins shortening, and then made it difficult for myself by failing to purchase any wax paper.

I’d never done pastry before, but the two thoughts in my head were that it’s a) hard to get the amount of water right, and b) easy to screw yourself if you don’t get it rolled out properly on the first or second try.

Well, the other thing never mentioned by the PP&M page is that it really really helps if the shortening is cold. At room temperature, the stuff is goopy, sticky, and impossible to work with. My first attempt was 1c of shortening, 3c of flour, and just a dribble of water. It was total mess and stuck to everything. So I balled it all up, threw it in the freezer, and switched to making the filling.

For the filling, I used three cups of the glop, plus the ingredients as directed by PP&M. Biggest heads-up here has to do with the two cans of evaporated milk–when they say to shake, they mean it! That stuff separates, and if you fail to adequately shake (as I did), you leave behind a bunch of it on the bottom of the can.

The directions suggest a mixer for this stage, but I just whisked it and that seemed to be fine. There were a few bits of pumpkin that hadn’t been complete pureed, but I figured a little texture couldn’t hurt.

Back to the crust.

Immediately, I could tell that getting this thing chilled was the key. The other key was upping the flour content, but that one kind of happened by itself. Each time I rolled it out, I put quite a thick bed of flour on the counter to stop it sticking, and then a bunch on the rolling pin, too. By the third attempt, I had a pretty resilient crust that tore just once while transferring it to the pie plate.

In future, I’ll use wax paper. But this worked pretty well, and definitely came out flakey/crumbly, as promised. Here was the final result, after about 80 minutes in the oven:

Pie time!

Mike

← Earlier Later → Posted at 1:42 pm to Food, Photos.