Pumpkin Pie Time!

Nothing quite says 'Fall is here, and the holidays are on their way!' quite like a pumpkin pie. I've  been making them for ages right out of a can, using Bisquick's 'Impossible Pumpkin Pie' recipe which doesn't even require a crust. I've always had an inkling to do it from the gourd itself - after all, who hasn't seen the seed packets labeled 'Pie Pumpkin' at Lowes?

Against my mother's warnings of what a pain in the as it would be, I did it. I grew the pumpkins in my garden (they quickly took over the better part of our plot) and took home the goods.

Cute, and a lot of effort!

We got about three pumpkins from our vines, all around the size of a small soccer ball. As for the recipe, we used the following from Betty Crocker 1978, but this website here looks like it has some pretty solid directions.  


Cutting up a pie pumpkin is like carving up a cantaloupe, except harder. Brian and I decided the easiest thing to do would be to cube the pie before cooking it, but we should have read the Pick -Your-Own site first, as they just chop it in half, gut it, and bake whole, scooping the flesh out when it's done. Judging by my nicked and tired hands, I'd do that! I did cube the remaining pumpkins to freeze them though - I froze about 3 pies worth. Really, the most time consuming part of making the pie from scratch versus the stuff in a can is the cutting and cubing of the pumpkin - which, had we known what we know now, we would have done differently!


All our peels and innards went into the compost bin, and we mixed all of the ingredients up in the processor. Really, once you've got your cooked pumpkin guts, it turns into any old pumpkin pie recipe, so you can use your favorite, the one I used was nothing special so I didn't include it.  In the processor, I was cautiously optimistic: it looks just like normal canned pie, just a tad more yellow than the orange-y brown I'm used to.  I filled the home made pie crust shell (see other post from today) and put it in the oven with a prayer. An hour later, this beauty emerged:

It looks like a pie, it smells like a pie, could it be...

After letting it cool off, we dug in. And you know what? It didn't taste like the canned pie, at all. It was BETTER. It tasted so fresh, so light, not dense like canned. There is more texture from spots where the pumpkin didn't get quite as pureed, but it's a pleasant texture, not a yucky one. All in all, I highly reccomend using your own pumpkin. It took half a squash to make a single pie, so the rest is sitting in my freezer til Thanksgiving. Pumpkins are pretty easy to grow in any clime, so go for it!