Pumpkin Custard and Pie

Pumpkin pie always appears on our Thanksgiving table, but I also love to eat just the custard by itself all through pumpkin season.

You can use canned pumpkin for this recipe (look for organic canned pumpkin at your natural food store), but I highly recommend that you use fresh pumpkin, again, organic if you can find it.

When we lived in California, every October we would take an hour's drive down to Half Moon Bay, where several miles of winding country road passed by at least a dozen pumpkin farms. We would go out the fields where they were grown and choose a pumpkin for a jack-o-lantern and a pumpkin for a pie (by the time you're done with the-lantern, it really isn't very good for pie).

Now, here in Florida, we bought our pumpkins this year from a charity "pumpkin patch." Even though it wasn't exactly visiting the farm, it had that flavor.

Though cookbooks recommend steaming pumpkin, I roast it, which concentrates the flavor rather than adding more water. Just cut the pumpkin in half from top to bottom, clean out the seeds, and place the pumpkin in a roasting pan or on a cookie sheet and roast at 350 degrees. The time will depend on the size. One small pumpkin (about 10-12 inches in diameter) is enough to make one pie and takes about two hours to roast. Bake the pumpkin until soft, let it cool, then scrape out the meat with a spoon. Mash or puree, then use it for any pumpkin recipe.

Wash the seeds, spread them on a cookie sheet, and roast them in the oven while you are roasting the pumpkin, for about 10 minutes. We like to put butter and salt on them. They are best hot out of the oven. This way, we eat all the edible parts of the pumpkin.

1 cup sweetener (see below)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon powdered ginger*
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1 1/2 cups cooked or canned pumpkin, mashed or pureed
1 1/2 cups cream**
1/2 cup milk**
2 eggs, slightly beaten

* Or 4 tablespoons finely grated fresh ginger (use a microplane grater)
** You can adjust proportion of milk and cream to suit yourself. Use 2 cups total of milk and cream combined.

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.
2. Combine all the ingredients in a large bowl and beat until smooth with an electric mixer.
3. To make custard, pour the mixture into a baking dish or individual custard cups or ramekins. To make pie, pour the mixture into a 9-inch pie shell.
4. Bake for 10 minutes, then lower the heat to 300 degrees F and bake for about 45 minutes, or until custard is firm. Smaller dishes will be done sooner.

SWEETENER OPTIONS

I tested this recipe with eight different sweeteners, so everyone can have pumpkin pie. My husband and I tasted them all. This really showed the difference between sweeteners and reinforced for me that different sweeteners are best suited for different uses. Here are the results, in order of our preference...

unrefined cane sugar (such as Sucanat or Rapadura) This was the favorite for both of us. I used Rapadura sugar, which is cane juice dehydrated without separating the sugar and the molasses. So it had sweeteness and depth, dissolved well, and had a nice golden color.

Rice syrup and barley malt syrup. I tried each of these separately, then combined half and half. Barley malt alone was too strong and very dark. Rice syrup alone was very light and not very sweet. The combination of the two was perfect. The molasses taste of the barley malt gave the rice syrup a nice depth of flavor.

Apple syrup. This was Larry's favorite. I liked it a lot too, but he really loves apples. I like it because in colonial times pumpkins and apples were both growing in the same region and harvested at the same time, so this is a logical pairing. I can imagine this custard with some baked apples on the side, sprinkled with raisins and chopped nuts and a dollop of whipped cream, and a maple cookie cut in the shape of a leaf. Now that's an autumn dessert!

Maple syrup. We both liked this for sweetness. It didn't have a very strong maple flavor, but there was a little maple aftertaste. I like the idea of using maple syrup with pumpkin because they are both so quintessentially American. If you really want maple flavor in your pumpkin, use Grade B maple syrup, which is stronger, or add a little maple flavor extract.

Date sugar. This, along with the straight barley malt, was one of the only two we wouldn't recommend. The date sugar didn't dissolve very well, and it's bulk made the custard dry instead of creamy and smooth.

It was requested that I bring pumpkin, pecan, and apple pies to Thanksgiving dinner one year. I used the unrefined cane sugar for the pumpkin because brown rice and barley malt syrup make the best pecan pie and then used the apple syrup to make an apple-sweetened apple pie. What a feast!