Pumpkin Pie

Growing up, I was a cake kid.  My mom would make cakes from the box, mostly Duncan Hines, but she would make her own frosting from butter and powdered sugar.  This tasted like pure fuel and gave any kid the energy they needed to party.  It was simple, it got the job done, and it was very very sugary. I went with chocolate most of the time and with a family of five, that meant five cakes a year at least.  

As a modern western Californian in middle class, I had a lot of opportunities to eat sugar.  Our family diet was wrapped around convenience and processing so everything was built around stability and flavors that triggered the brain that it was good.  

So pie, was not really a go to dessert. There were two that made it to our table and those were only around during the winter holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas.  The Christmas pie is in the category but wasn’t really pie. It was a mousse in a crumb crust.  But we wished we had it more often.  The second pie was pumpkin, made with a crumb crust as well and baked using Libbey’s pumpkin pie puree. Which turns out is part pumpkin part sweet potato.  

Pumpkin pie is not the same kind of pie that is thought of when a cartoonist needs to animate a pie cooling on the window sill. It doesn’t have a flaky crust over and under it. It uses ground up crumbs of cookies or other baked good that are bound together with melted butter and baked to set again.  Also the filling is not like fruit pie that is sliced and tossed with thickeners and sugars. It is more like a cheese cake, where fillings are mixed with eggs and the heat of the oven sets the proteins so the whole mix congeals and sets.  

A better pumpkin pie comes from roasting pumpkins.  This gives you a better sense of what the land is providing.  Hence when at the store there is a variety called sugar pie pumpkin.  

So for this season, if you are looking to serve pumpkin pie for the holidays, look into what The Table Catering is offering and see if you like a true real pumpkin pie.