I just had pumpkin pie for dessert! It was wonderful! All those supurb tastes and textures!
Anyway, have you ever had raw pumpkin? Don’t! It’s gross!
Why is it that when you put some spices and a crust around something as gross as pumpkin it turns in to (arguably) the best pie there is??
My girlfriends mother once said “It’s all spices, pumpkin is just the medium”
There are a few things that make everything taste good. Sugar, fat, and salt. In a basic pumpkin pie, you have all three: sugar (or condensed milk, or maple syrup), butter, cream, and salt (in both the fling and crust). The pumpkin, which cooks down to it’s sweet, starchy nature in the canning process, is just an excuse for the cream and sugar. Mmmmmmmmmmm. Add a little ice cream for even more fat, sugar and salt and you are in taste bud heaven.
You can make ‘pumpkin’ pie out of many different things.
It’s the spices that make it work. I usually make it out of carrots, since fresh pumpkin is really hard to get up north.
If you can’t get canned pumpkin near you, I think you roast small pumkins to get the pulp but I’m not exactly sure how. Someone else will have to help you.
Even Julia Child sees no point in making it out of fresh pumpkin, since, as Çyrin’s girlfriends mother said, “Pumpkin is just the medium.” She (Child) recommends the canned stuff.
And we cannot forget the eggy goodness that holds it together in a custardy gloop!
Wife, who doesn’t pay any attention to Julia Child, pokes a few vents in a whole pumpkin with a chopstick, puts it in a pan, and bakes it at 350F until the skin starts to brown. It peels real easily then and you scoop out the seeds and strings with a spoon. Almost as easy as opening a can.
Making pumpkin pulp is easy. Chop the thing into 5 cm squares (about the length of your thumb), and boil it in slightly salted water until it goes soft. Takes about half an hour or so.
Only then do you bother taking off the peels, because they’ll just slide off (even if it is damn hot).
Squish, measure out 2 cups to a baggie, squash out air and toss in freezer until needed. Great for pies and soup.
I think the fact that you probably don’t eat it very often makes it taste good. Sure, it is good in and of itself, but I’ll wager that you don’t make a pumpkin pie every week. It becomes a treat when you do make one, and that adds to the whole experience.
I like mine with whipped cream and lots of nutmeg and cinammon.
If you like pumpkin pie, do yourself a favor and try a sweet potato pie. Same sort of thing, and, IMO, better.
Back when I lived in the East Bay, Uhuru House periodically had fund raisers in which they sold baked goods outside the supermarkets. I learned to treat that as a signal to snag a sweet potato pie, as surely as the Girl Scouts signalled “thin mints”.