Contents
A spiced custard in a pastry shell. It is not a fruit pie at all, and treating it as a custard — which is what it is — fixes almost everything people get wrong with it. The dish is genuinely old in North America; recipes for pumpkin baked in a crust appear in English cookbooks in the seventeenth century and in American ones from 1796.
What makes it work
- Blind bake the shell. A wet custard poured into raw pastry gives a raw bottom, every time. See all-butter pie crust for the method, and seal it with egg white.
- Cook the purée down first. Ten minutes in a pan with the spices drives off water and concentrates flavour — the difference between a bright pie and a bland one. Fresh-roasted pumpkin needs this more than canned.
- Custard sets at 77 °C and curdles at about 85 °C. Bake at 160 °C, not 190 °C, and pull it when the outer 5 cm is set and the middle 8 cm still wobbles.
- Cracks mean overbaking. They are a curdled custard's way of announcing itself, and they cannot be undone.
- Evaporated milk or cream, not fresh milk. Higher solids, less water, a firmer set.
- Use a dense squash. A field jack-o'-lantern pumpkin is watery and stringy; a sugar pie pumpkin, a kabocha or a butternut is better. See Pumpkins and Squash And Gourds.
Ingredients
One 23 cm pie. Serves 8.
- 1 blind-baked shell — all-butter pie crust
- 425 g pumpkin purée
- 150 g light brown sugar
- 50 g granulated sugar
- 3 eggs plus 1 yolk
- 300 ml evaporated milk or double cream
- 5 g fine salt
- 8 g ground cinnamon
- 3 g ground ginger
- 2 g nutmeg
- 1 g ground cloves
- 1 g ground allspice
- 1 tsp vanilla — see Pure vanilla extract
- optional: 2 tbsp bourbon or dark rum
Method
Blind bake the shell and leave the oven at 160 °C / 325 °F.
Cook the purée with the spices and salt in a wide pan over medium heat for 8–10 minutes, stirring, until it darkens, thickens and smells toasted.
Off the heat, whisk in both sugars, then the eggs and yolk, then the evaporated milk, vanilla and any spirit. Strain the mixture through a sieve — this catches any cooked egg and gives a silky set.
Pour into the warm shell. Bake 45–55 minutes, until the edge is set and the centre wobbles as one piece. An instant-read thermometer in the middle should say 77 °C.
Cool completely, at least three hours, then refrigerate if not serving the same day.
Notes
- Serve at room temperature, with unsweetened whipped cream. Fridge-cold pumpkin pie tastes of much less.
- Sweet potato pie is the close relative and, in much of the American South, the preferred one — see sweet potato pie.
- Keeps four days refrigerated. It does not freeze well; the custard weeps.
Elsewhere on the site
Method and theory: Pie and tart recipes · pies and tarts · Pumpkins · eggs
Nearby: sweet potato pie · custard pie · chess pie