Pumpkin Feta Tart - Vegetarian Homemade Pie Recipe EASY Step by Step (2024)

FAQs

How was pumpkin pie made? ›

Early American settlers of the Plymouth Colony in southern New England (1620-1692) may have made pumpkin pies, of sorts, without crusts. They stewed pumpkins or filled a hollowed out pumpkin shell with milk, honey and spices, and then baked it in hot ashes. Northeastern Native American tribes grew squash and pumpkins.

For cooking, you'll want to use sugar pumpkins (also called pie or sweet pumpkins), which are small and round. Long Island Cheese pumpkins, which are more oblong and can look like a wheel of cheese, are also good to eat. Field pumpkin types are larger, have watery, stringy flesh, and are best for decorating.

Homemade Pumpkin Pie Ingredients

For the filling: cooked pumpkin, evaporated milk, eggs, brown sugar, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, salt.

Pumpkin pie is a dessert pie with a spiced, pumpkin-based custard filling. The pumpkin and pumpkin pie are both a symbol of harvest time, and pumpkin pie is generally eaten during the fall and early winter.

They are the same product. Both canned pumpkin puree and pie filling are useful, shelf-stable ingredients that can help speed up your kitchen prep time. Just remember that puree is unsweetened, while pie filling contains sugar and spices. This will help you choose the right pumpkin product for your recipes.

PiesTarts – If you've ever thought a tart was pie, you're forgiven because they're incredibly similar. The main difference is that tarts only have a bottom crust, and the crust is much thicker than a pie crust.

Pie made in a metal pan

Of the three pies, the metal pan had the most even browning across the entire bottom crust. From the outer edge to the very center, the crust was golden brown and thoroughly baked. If I had my choice of pans, I'd go with an aluminum one like this.

Stoneware is the poorest conductor of heat out of this lineup of pie plates, as it heats up the most slowly. However, it does distribute heat evenly and maintains heat well once it is hot. Stoneware is a good choice for more delicate pies like pumpkin or custard.

Pumpkin Varieties for Cooking

Flesh of carving pumpkins are generally stringy, watery and bland, but can be used for making pies. The best varieties for making pumpkin pies are Baby Bear, Cinderella, Jarrahdale and Fairytale.

If you meant to purchase pumpkin pie filling but accidentally grabbed a can of plain pumpkin, it's easy to sweeten and season the puree. Follow a good pumpkin pie recipe (there's usually a recipe printed right on the label) and add sugar and spices to the puree along with other ingredients like eggs before baking.

What is the best canned pumpkin pie filling? ›

Libby's 100% Pure Pumpkin

In this taste test, our Test Kitchen pros found that the biggest name in the pumpkin game does, in fact, make the best canned pumpkin on the market. Libby's 100% Pure Pumpkin is a favorite among our culinary crew.

Sugar Baby Pumpkin

You'll find lots of sugar babies available at the farmers' market. Also known as Sugar Pie pumpkins, these thin-skinned squash are smaller (4-8 lbs.) and have a sweet, dense flesh with a fine-grained, smooth texture.

While not traditional or really necessary due to the time pumpkin custard takes to cook, you can avoid a 'soggy' bottomed pumpkin pie, by laying down some parchment paper in the shell, fill it with pie weights or old beans, wrapping the edges with foil then par baking the crust for 10-15 minutes at 425ºF.

While pies look covered from all sides, tarts are open from the top and you can easily see the filling on top. Another difference lies in the base. While pies have a thin and smooth crust, tarts have a rather thick and crumbly crust which crumbles down when pieces are cut from the tart.

While pie crusts are very flaky and light, tart crusts or pastry crusts, tend to be firm and crumbly and not at all flaky. A standard tart crust contains flour, sugar, salt, and a beaten egg, all incorporated together in a food processor and then chilled before use.

There's only one problem: There are almost no genuine pumpkin pies in the world. As Emma Crist lamented on MyRecipes.com, those thousands of cans on supermarket shelves that say they contain 100 percent pumpkin puree are flat-out lying to you. What's inside is actually 100 percent squash.

Pumpkins (along with other forms of squash) were a historically important food staple among Native Americans. They would grow the squash along river banks next to maize and beans, a planting technique that was called the “Three Sisters Method,” which allowed the three crops to sustain each other.

The practice of carving pumpkin jack-o'-lanterns for the Halloween season developed from a traditional practice in Ireland as well as Scotland and other parts of the United Kingdom of carving lanterns from the turnip, mangelwurzel, or swede (rutabaga).

FAST FACTS ABOUT PUMPKIN PIE

The Pilgrims' version of pumpkin pie involved picking the pumpkin, washing it, hollowing it out, filling it with cream or milk and baking it whole. The first published recipe for our modern version of pumpkin pie was included in the 1796 edition of “American Cookery” by Amelia Simmons.