Holiday season is upon us and that means we can expect lots of dinner invitations. If you’re wondering what to bring to help things along, may I suggest a home-made pumpkin pie. And Chef Jerry Pellegrino agrees that a well-made dessert, made from scratch, is always welcome?
The first thing to come to grips with is your choice of pumpkin. Technically speaking, any old pumpkin will do, but to be fair about it, the big Jack O' Lantern varieties are too watery, too stringy and too low in sugar to be useful. (And you certainly cannot re-purpose a cut up Jack O' Lantern which would most certainly make you sick.)
Across the centuries, farmers have been breeding much more appropriate cultivars for eating. Inevitably they are smaller, often not much bigger than a softball, with good consistency in the flesh, and high sugar levels for flavor. In colonial times, a tasty pumpkin would be hollowed out and filled with milk, spices and honey then cooked in the embers of the fire. This dish, called "pompion" sounds suspiciously like a recipe for modern pumpkin pie filling.
Today some of the best know varieties are Jack Be Little, the dark orange fleshed Jarrahdale from New Zealand, the heritage variety Long Island Cheese, the popular Sugar Babies, and the one I used: the Rouge Vif d'Etampes, better known as the Cinderella (it looks exactly like Cinderella’s Pumpkin Coach, a little flattened out, with brilliant red-orange color.)
I was steered to Cinderella by my farmer friend Billy Caulk of Pine Grove Farm. Billy is an expert in melons, gourds and pumpkins and he has a reason for bringing each variety to my Saturday market. He said the 10-pound Cinderella I bought would be good for at least two, maybe three pies. I was in business.
The important first step is to get the flesh out of the pumpkin. Warning: do not attempt to peel the skin with a knife. You'll only hurt yourself. Instead, cut the pumpkin into quarters, or chunks and pull out the seeds and membrane. Rub the chunks up with olive oil and place them on tinfoil in a baking sheet with sides. Bake for 60 minutes, more or less in a 400° oven, and that will do the trick. Poke the skin with a fork, and if it punctures easily, you're done.
Let the pumpkin quarters cool down, then scoop out the flesh with a good stout spoon. Place batches of the cooked flesh in a strainer of some kind and press down to squeeze out water. All pumpkins will be a bit watery, so this is an unavoidable step.
Place the flesh in a food processor and process until a rough purée forms. Do not use the purée button, which will very quickly over-process the pumpkin and make it more liquid than it needs to be. After processing, drain again in a fine meshed strainer, and pour into a large ceramic bowl.
For sweeteners you have a broad choice of ingredients, but I think simple brown sugar is all you need. Stir a cup of the sugar into the pumpkin and then you'll want to get an electric hand mixer out.
You then add your spices: traditionally cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and ground cloves. But as Jerry has pointed out, it's easy to get a bottle of pre-mixed Pumpkin Pie Spice that works perfectly well. About 2 tablespoons will do the trick. One last spice that works far out of proportion to the amount used is a half-teaspoon of ground black pepper. It has the quality of amplifying all the other spices without much influencing the flavor.
You'll need a useful liquid to thin the mixture, and a can of sweet condensed milk works perfectly. Add two whole eggs and a heaping tablespoon of corn starch and you've got all the thickening you need. Fire up the beater and mix everything as thoroughly as you can. You will end up with a big bowl of a very liquid-looking filling. Don't worry because the eggs and cornstarch will be activated by the baking. Also, allowing the finished pie to set up over a couple hours will guarantee the creamy smooth texture you're looking for.
What ever crust you want to use, home-made or store-bought, you of course only need a single crust. It's a good idea to blind bake it, however. Once that’s done, fill the pie and bake it for a little more than an hour at that same 400°, having taken care to cover the edge with tinfoil.
Coming out of the oven, it was a thing of beauty. The filling was pleasantly swollen up, and as lovely a brown/orange as ever you'll see. Not a crack in the filling at all, which is regarded as a small triumph. We let it cool overnight, then had it during the 4th quarter of the Ravens' game. Quite simply, I've never tasted a better pumpkin pie. Thank you, Princess Cinderella!
