So I was looking around for a pie crust recipe online and came across this recipe for “faux pumpkin pie”. It’s made of cooked, pureed carrots instead of pumpkins. I was dubious, to say the least. The website seemed very confident, so I had to give it a whirl.
It was amazing! I think next time I will increase the spices, and I should add that I had no evaporated milk so I used whipping cream and milk instead.
I really really recommend trying this! I can’t get canned pumpkin where I live and every attempt at fresh pumpkin pie seems lacking.
link:
Is this ok to link to that here? It’s not a commercial site or anything. If it should be problematic I will be happy to comply with whatever needs to be done to rectify it. I stop short of Human Cent-iPad, though.
Not sure that I will try it, but I’ll bet it has a nice appetizing color.
I read in the local paper a couple of weeks ago that for a while now pumpkins have been bred for appearance and size rather than taste. So the growers must be thinking of contests and decorations rather than cooking. I suppose there are fewer people making their own pies.
And I have had the same disappointment as you in trying to make one from scratch.
My solution this year was to top it with pecan streusel, warm carmel sauce and whipped cream. No calories in that!
I once made pie using steamed, mashed garnet yams in place of pumpkin. It was absolutely wonderful - in fact, I think it tasted better than pumpkin. I think any sweet, orange vegetable would substitute for pumpkin very well.
we had it for dessert tonight (the second of two I made yesterday), this time with fresh whipped cream with a little vanilla sugar mixed in. That was a bull’s eye. Calories make EVERYTHING taste better! It was great!
Sweet potatoes taste more like pumpkin than pumpkin does. So the secret to making pumpkin pie from scratch without canned pumpkin is to use sweet potatoes.
If you try to buy a jack-o-lantern pumpkin and cook it, you are going to be sorely disappointed. They are bred for size and looks, and are bland and watery.
To make pumpkin puree like you get in the cans, you need to get kabocha or other dense squashes that are bred for taste and sweetness rather than looks.
But any dense sweet orange or yellow vegetable would work, carrot is a pretty reasonable substitute if you can’t get orange sweet potatoes.
Third. I’ve been eating sweet potato pie my whole life, only to discover it hadn’t been pumpkin 35 years later. Carrots, unless the size of softballs, just don’t seem worth the effort.
You can often find actual cooking pumpkins around this time of year if you have some fairly well-stocked grocery stores. They’re much smaller than the jack-o-lantern types. The best ones are a little larger than a softball. Of course, pumpkin is one of those things, like sweet potatoes and beets, that really doesn’t lose much but texture in the canning process, and if you’re using it in a pie, the canned puree works just fine.
I’m still going to try this with sweet potatoes, though. We always end up with too many sweet potatoes in the fall.
I dunno, I’ve made pumpkin pies from canned pumpkin and they were good. But the one I made from a fresh pie pumpkin was so good, it was unreal. Of course the crust was home made and the whipped cream was real.
I’d be interested in trying out the carrot pie. I always seem to have a big sad bag o’ babby carrots forgotten in the vegetable drawer.
