I admit that fake news circulating on social media made me question everything I thought I knew about pumpkin pie; one of my top 5 favorite foods. Could it be that I had gone my whole life without having a “real” pumpkin pie? Had I been duped by canned pumpkin puree?
Obviously, I was going to have to make a pie from scratch from fresh pumpkins to convince myself I hadn’t missed something critical. And now that that is out of the way, I can check it off of my culinary bucket list and go back to using canned “pumpkin”, thank God.
Here is how I did it:
Bake the pumpkin
After gutting the pumpkin and chopping it up into quarters, put it on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper, cover it tightly with foil, and then bake it at 325 degrees for 1 1/2-2 hours. Just this step alone takes longer than it would take you to make an entire pie using canned pumpkin. Just thought you would like to know.
Puree the pumpkin
Once the pumpkin has cooled enough for you to be able to touch it, cut away the orange rind and put the pumpkin meat into your food processor for a good blending.
Strain the pumpkin
You will then need to strain the processed pumpkin until it achieves the consistency of canned pumpkin. This took 3 hours.3 hours of straining through cheese cloth pulled out 3 cups of liquid. You can’t skip or rush this step or you will have pumpkin soup instead of pie.
Finally,make your pie
I use the pumpkin pie and pie crust recipes from my Joy of Cooking cookbook, but use whatever your go-to recipe is. Your pie will likely be more yellow than it would be if you used canned pumpkin.
Serve and eat
In the end, we had a fresh pumpkin pie that tasted just like a canned pumpkin pie. This is clearly a situation in which food engineering in favor of convenience is serving humanity very well. Also, one of my guests asked me what was wrong with the pie; it seemed to be the wrong color; Sigh.
