I have spent my adult years around men that don't like pumpkin pie, making the holidays a fretful time for me. I love pumpkin pie-creamy smoothness given heft by the vegetable, the generous spices-yummy!
But it's hardly worth making if you're the only one that is going to eat it. So over the years I've relied on the generosity of others to bring by a piece of leftover pie, or a trip to a cafeteria to pick one up.
This year, however, I've found others that enjoy the hearty goodness of this traditional pie, and I decided to experiment. Around Halloween I bought a huge French heirloom pumpkin, lopsided, red flecks covering its pale orange flesh. I got the chef's knife, cut it into sections, and roasted it. My husband got out the food mill and went to work, ending up with about a gallon of pumpkin puree.
I went to the tried and true The Way to Cook by Julia Child. It's never let me down before, but there's a first time for everything, and I hit it here. It's a soufflé style, a little lighter than the normal custard style. Okay, good, I like soufflé. Use canned or fresh pumpkin she says. Okay, I have fresh pumpkin. Now, she does say, very clearly that this recipe makes two pies. I, however, managed to not understand that little fact until I had one pie plate (complete with pie dough) filled with the soufflé, and still had a mixing bowl's worth of the orange goo left. Now, I'll admit, the stuff looked a little watery. But I figured all of that would evaporate as it cooked. The extra pumpkin filling I put in a soufflé dish, deciding to try it without the crust.
The wateriness never went away. The pumpkin pie was cooked, and still, water sitting on the top. Maybe it would evaporate during cooling. I hustled it into a covered container, went to a friend's house, ate dinner, and took the pie out, and still, watery. We dug in anyway. Flavorful, spicy, and the bits not soaked had a nice texture. But very little didn't seem drowned. And the same with the crustless version.
Over the next two weeks, I made pumpkin cookies and pumpkin bread and pumpkin cakes, eventually coming to this conclusion. You must, and there is no around it, you must drain the fresh pumpkin. Even when you've drained it and drained it, you'll still be able to get more water out of it. This little fact is, as far as I can tell, not usually mentioned in recipes. I won't say never, because surely someone alerts the cook, but none that I encountered said the first thing about it. And they should have.
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