Gastronomy612′s Weblog

Have you seen all of the adorable baby pumpkins at the store?  Maybe you noticed the stickers on them saying something about pie.  Perhaps when you went apple picking all of the baby pumpkins had a sign nearby also proclaiming “PIES!”  Believe it or not, making a pumpkin pie does not have to include aluminum can, much less a can opener.  That’s right, you can create your OWN pie filling.

Start of by buying one of these small pumpkins (~8″ in diameter…or has a pie sticker/sign on it).  Nature did her job and made them much sweeter than the giant Jack-O-Lanterns that you typically want to buy to carve some garrish design in to.  Don’t be tempted though – get the little guy.  Using a sharp knife, perhaps a bread knife, cut it in half, cut the stem off and remove (but save!) the seeds.  Clean out the other goop and pop your baby pumpkin in the oven at 350F for about 40 minutes or so.  Treat it like any other squash.  When it is done baking, let it cool.

While you’re waiting for it to cool, make your pie crust.  Seriously!  Don’t waste money and get one of those pre-baked cardboard tasting crusts.  That’s disgusting and quite frankly,  you’re better than that.  You know that, right?  In fact follow the crust recipe here, but cut it in half.  It’s super easy and quick.

Now that you took the time to make the crust, your pumpkin cooled!  Peel the skin off and cut the pumpkin into small enough pieces to toss in your food processor.

Don’t use the pulse button.  Just. Turn. It. On.  Keep it running until the pumpkin is so smooth that you could drink it.

Now that your pumpkin puree is made, and your pie crust is par baked, you are ready to get going on the Sweet Melissa’s Ginger Custard Pumpkin Pie!  This recipe mostly appealed to me because I had all of the ingredients on hand, and it was pretty different: 1) It has no corn syrup in it, 2) It encourages you to use fresh pumpkin puree (yeh!), 3) it has ginger in i, giving the pie some spice 4) It does not have nutmeg.  Crazy stuff, right?  All of this appealed o me for the above reasons, but it also didn’t matter because I don’t care for pumpkin pie.

Her recipe is very straight forward.  The only thing that I changed was the amount of ginger.  As  I pulled the fresh ginger out of the refrigerator (is that even where you are supposed to store it!?) and eyeballed a 6 x 1 inch piece, I was taken aback and scaled the amount down to a 4 x 1 inch piece.   Aside from this, I followed the recipe to a T.  For that reason and the fact that it is so straight forward, (and taking pictures of scalding cream never look good, much less appetizing) I think you should just run with it.

But, here is a picture before I baked the pie…

Look.  At. That!  So silky smooth.  So custardy, so sexy!

I have this problem with custard and more liquid based pies (or other goods) where I am really hesitant to pull the item out of the oven in fear that it did not bake through all of the way.  I understand the jiggle test, but how much jiggle is enough?  Or too much?  Should it jiggle at all?  It’s a very confusing aspect of baking things like this for me.  I couldn’t be more embarrassed than pulling it out too early and someone cuts in to it and it’s liquidy in the middle.  The horror, the HORROR!

In an effort to bypass any liquid incidences, I left it n the oven 10 minutes or so longer than what Melissa recommends, which may or may not have been good, since after cooling, the pie was pulling away from the crust.

No matter.  Because we are not permitted to keep a lot of treats and baked goods in the house (watching our figures and all…) I sent it to work with David where it was gobbled up.  It got high praise because it was made with fresh pumpkin puree and was different and spicy!  Change up your all recipes, toss out the HFCS and pre-baked pie crusts and give this a try this Autumn.