pumpkin pie

I used that awesome pumpkin-pie recipe again this year, but I didn't have access to a garden-fresh pumpkin as I did last year. Instead, I ordered "pumpkin purée" from Coupang, and it came as a frozen, 2-kilogram block in a plastic bag. The thing looked ridiculous, and it took the better part of a day to thaw. 

I'm also morbidly curious as to the pie's texture. The lack of cracking is a good sign, but I wonder whether my use of the broiler during the last five minutes of baking might have toughened the pie up. I guess we'll all find out tomorrow. I can already tell by the smell that the pie won't be as good as last year's, but I do hope the texture is okay.

Because of the snow today, the boss called to say he wouldn't be coming in, so it's just me and my Korean coworker in our little corner office.

pumpkin pie with ugly-but-serviceable crust

As you see above, the pie's crust is my typical, standard pie crust: flour, butter, salt, and cold water (I forgot to add sugar to the crust, but the pie's filling is plenty sweet). Below, you see a crumble. Originally, this was supposed to be the pie's crust, but everything went wrong. I used food-processed Biscoff cookies for the crumble; I then added too much melted butter such that the mixture went from lightly wet sand (what it's supposed to be) to something close to a water-logged concrete mix. I blind-baked it, anyway, for about ten minutes, and that was enough to tell me to stop right there. After ten minutes of baking, I could tell the crust was well cooked but right on the edge of burning. Since the pumpkin-pie recipe called for baking the pie for 50-55 minutes, I knew that the crumble crust would be a charred, carbonized mess by the end of that baking time. By blitzing up Biscoff cookies, with their Oreo-style filling, I had introduced too much sugar to the crumble crust: sugar tends to burn if you expose it to heat for too long. I had also used way too much butter. Butter is an emulsion of fat, water, and milk solids, and the water content meant that a lot of water had to boil off for the crumble crust to harden. What happened, during this bake, was that I'd gotten all of my proportions wrong and introduced too much sugar, thereby throwing everything off. A crumble crust really doesn't need too much melted butter to hold together. Anyway, the crust was fucked, so I used a fork to crumble it up into the form you see below, and it'll now be a perfectly serviceable sprinkle to go atop the pumpkin pie. With whipped cream, of course. I'm thinking about buying or making a caramel drizzle, too. I know how to make a boozy drizzle from my Bananas Foster recipe. I have a sneaky feeling that the pie is going to need some outside help in order to taste good, hence the crumble, the drizzle, and the whipped cream.

Upshot: when I realized I'd messed up the crumble crust, I sulked a bit, then screwed up my determination and made the flour crust, which can endure a great deal of punishment from the oven. Astute readers who cook will note with amusement that I baked the pie, not in a pie tin, but in a cake pan. Hey, whatever works.

the crumble crust that became a simple crumble

Trivia: when I was in France in 2018, I learned that the French term for crumble is simply un crumble. Just pronounce it the French way.