Wanted to make pumpkin pie for a while and I finally got an excuse to do it. As far as I know no one here has had pumpkin pie before, except for that one time my grandad made one, but we don’t talk about that. Id say it worked pretty well, and it was worth spending £1 on can of evaporated milk at the last minute because I thought we had some but I was wrooooong. By the way, £1 is a ripoff for evaporated milk. Just get offbrand stuff, there’s literally no difference and its like half the price.
Update note: Unless you have a blender with the power of a chainsaw you’re best using a hand-food processor when mixing all the ingredients together, its purely textural and doesn’t affect the taste.
You’ll need:
Filling:
- 650g Pumpkin, peeled, gutted, roasted, mashed (this makes it a puree which is what you get in shop-bought cans)
- 1 Tin evaporated milk (usual tin is 410g)
- 170g Soft dark brown sugar
- 2 Beaten eggs
- 1tsp Cinnamon
- 1tsp Nutmeg
- 0.5tsp Ginger
- Couple pinches of salt
Pastry:
- Sweet Shortcrust Pastry, Link hereeeeeeee -> Sweet shortcrust pastry recipe <-
Method:
1. With an electric mixer, or really fast by hand, mix together the pumpkin, sugar, evaporated milk, and eggs. Then add the spices and salt. Basically just whirr all the filling ingredients together (*Update* this is where the food processor can be used to get rid of the stringiness of the pumpkin). Grease a roughly 2 inch deep flan tin and preheat oven to gas mark 6/200*C/400*F.
2. On a floured surface, roll out the pastry to a couple inches bigger than the dish, fold the pastry in half, position the rolling pin in front, fold it back over the rolling pin and put it into the flan dish, the pastry, not the rolling pin. Gently lift and push it down into the dish (this avoids stretching the dough so that it wont retract when its baking), although if it rips at this stage then its too thin, re roll or make a bit more pastry, don’t roll it too many times though, it’ll get tough and hard and that’s not particularly good.
3. Prick the pastry case with a fork, like in the corners and in the base. Pour the pumpkin filling in, if there’s any left over, you can make little pumpkin pies in a muffin tin, along with any extra pastry. Put it in the oven and cook for about 1hour to 1hour 10minutes. Goes pretty well with ice cream 😀 So yeah, done
