There is Always a Good Time for Pumpkin Pie!

In my family we cook everything from scratch. We don't buy pre made food for the holidays or even for our day to day life. We make everything from pies to macaroni salad from scratch. My mom has never served pasta sauce from a jar. My passion for cooking has always been there because I like to experiment with new and old recipes.

Ever since I was little, I have grown up with my grandma's pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving dinner and whenever we can convince her to make a pie for us. For the first time I finally made my own, very first, pumpkin pie. As you can imagine it was hard to follow behind my grandma's foot steps because hers is so good. My grandma made her pie for Thanksgiving but I felt the day after Thanksgiving would be the perfect time for myself to try my own pie from Ree Drummond's book The Pioneer Woman Cooks: A Year of Holidays. This book gave me helpful tips to making the perfect pumpkin pie so I could give my grandma a run for her money in baking the best pumpkin pie.

First, I hade to make the pie crust, which is the hardest part of making a pie from scratch. To begin, I added the flour, salt, shortening and butter in a large bowl. Then I used the pastry cutter to mix it until it looked like coarse crumbs. (286) Coarse crumbs are basically small pebbles of the butter and flour so there are no big chunks of butter left in the mixture. Then you beat the eggs in a separate bowl, not just add the egg in the bowl with the rest of your mixture. Add the egg into the mixture once you have beaten it and then add the vinegar, and cold water. (286) Lastly, you stir it all together and divide the dough into two balls to put into the freezer.

Next, came the easy part, making the filling. The trick is to buy "pumpkin puree, not pumpkin pie filling" (284) My grandma always uses pumpkin pie spice, but this recipe called for ground cloves, cinnamon and ginger. Another trick was to "whisk until the mixture is smooth" Whisking helps the filling not be over stirred and makes sure you get all the ingredients smoothed together. Once I finished the filling, it was time to roll out the dough.

Rolling out the dough is  hard because I learned very quickly that it cracks easily when rolling. To help prevent cracking, you lightly flour the surface you are rolling on and flour the rolling pin. (280) You then start from the middle and roll out the dough so it is " about 1 inch larger in diameter than the top of your pie pan" (280). Once I finished with rolling out the dough I put it in my pie pan and added a design around the edges by using my finger and pinching around the finger (280). A tool I used was the cat spatula to help turn the dough over so it wouldn't stick so much.

Then I filled the crust with the filling and put it in the oven at 425 degrees for 15 minutes and reduced the heat to 350 degrees and cooked the pie for another 40 minutes.

I knew when to pull the pie out "when it's no longer jiggly" (285) Once I pulled it out of the oven it needed to sit for about an hour so it wouldn't be as puffy. To my surprise it was just as good as my grandma's! My grandma uses sour cream in her pie so my pie had more of a pumpkin taste to it. Everyone loved it and went back for seconds!

Q: Have you ever made a pie from scratch, if so what kind?

Citation: Drummond, Ree. A Year of Holidays. N.p.: William Morrow Cook, 2013. Print.