My Christmas gift: Pumpkin Pie

I don’t do gifts much anymore, but this year, I give the massively egotistical gift of boasting of my own genius while taking credit for other people’s work.

λ pumpkin -> deliciousPie

Internet food blogger tradition is to start all recipes with a long-winded autobiographical essay, interspersed with twelve dozen pictures, before finally including the recipe in fine print with broken CSS at the very bottom of the article, just before the Disqus thread full of random diet spam and little old ladies saying “Nice!” before telling you everything in the recipe is wrong.

Here’s my autobiographical story: I like pumpkin pie. It is the best pie. I live in a country where they don’t eat it. So I had to cobble together my own recipe from the internet and experimentation. Here it is, so it’s easier for me to find later. The end.

Annie’s Perfect Pumpkin Pie

Ingredients

• 1 butternut squash (myskikurpitsa) (or 15oz. can Libby’s Pumpkin Puree, see step 9)
• 1 can (397g) sweetened condensed milk
• 2 eggs
• 5 ml cinnamon
• 2.5 ml salt
• 2.5 ml ginger
• 1 ml nutmeg
• 1 ml clove
• 1 frozen Myllyn Paras makea pyöreä piirakkataikina pie crust (or other pie crust as preferred)

Equipment needed:

• A deep pie dish or pan. I use a glass Pyrex dish, 26cm wide ×6cm deep. Height is important here, this is not a tart, but a proper thick pie, and the filling will rise in cooking.
• A heat safe mixing bowl
• A metal cooling rack
• A kitchen scale
• An oven
• A knife
• A potato masher or a food processor
• Some kind of stirring implement. Honestly today I just used a fork.

Instructions

1. Pre-heat the oven to 175°C.
2. Take out your frozen pie crust to thaw.
3. Cut the very top cap (the end with the stem) off the squash, then cut in half length-wise.
4. Scoop out the stringy gunk and seeds from the bottom ends of each half. Don’t bother saving the seeds, butternut squash meat may taste exactly like pumpkin, but the seeds don’t.
5. Place the two halves of the squash flesh side down on a baking sheet lined with baking paper. Roast for 50 minutes.
6. Remove from oven, transfer squash to a cooling rack and let cool for at least 20 minutes or until the squash is cool enough to handle.
7. Peel the skin from the squash and cut into rough chunks, by whatever devilry you find necessary. This may be a pain in the ass, and you will feel like you’re doing it wrong, but it’s just how it is dealing with squishy pumpkin fresh from an oven. Do what you gotta do, just don’t leave any skin bits in, that’s nasty.
8. Weigh out 425g of the cooked squash in the mixing bowl or the bowl of your food processor. Save the leftovers for another pie or any number of other tasty dishes (it’s great in soup, curry, and baked goods!)
9. Using your food processor, or your masher and the strength of your ancestors, turn the squash into a fine puree and let cool to room temperature if it hasn’t already. If you’re using a masher, I find it helps to then go over the squash even further with a fork to break it up as much as possible.
10. Alternately, skip steps 1–8 and use a 15oz. can of pumpkin puree, preferably Libby’s brand, if you’re lucky enough to find one of the ten cans of pumpkin allowed into Finland per year.
11. To your pumpkin puree, add the eggs, condensed milk, and spices, and combine thoroughly. You will get a liquid batter that looks way thinner than it probably should be, and maybe very slighty lumpy if you made your own puree, but trust me, it’ll be fine.
12. Raise the oven temperature to 220°C.
13. If using the Myllyn Paras crust, roll out your hopefully thawed pie crust to about half its thickness, until it’s wide enough to cover most of the bottom of the pie pan.
14. Lay your pie crust in the pan, and press out and up the sides, aiming to gentle stretch and press out the crust until it reaches at least about 3–4cm up the side of the pan. We want to give plenty of room for all that filling.
15. Pour puree mixture into pie crust.
16. Bake in 220°C oven for 15 minutes.
17. Lower temperature to 175°C, and continue to bake for 35 minutes.
18. If the filling has properly set, it will no longer jiggle when shaken, and a knife inserted in the center will come out clean instead of wet or gooey. If it’s still too liquid, return to the oven for no more than 5–10 minutes as needed.
19. Remove from oven and let cool for 2 hours on a wire rack.
20. You can serve now if you must, but it’s best to transfer to the fridge and let cool completely. Pumpkin pie is OK warm, but it’s actually better cold, because it gives plenty of time for the custard’s texture to fully set.
21. Slice and serve, optionally with a bit of whipped cream on top.

Acknowledgements

The basic technique of a condensed milk-based custard was borrowed from Eagle Brand’s official recipe, but the spice blend and the rest of the adaptations are my own.