Battle of the Pumpkins

One day when I was in high school a friend came over while my mom was making a pumpkin pie. She watched curiously as mom seeded, peeled, chopped and finally steamed the pumpkin before mixing it up into pie filling.

“My mom always uses canned pumpkin,” she said.

Then my mom got out the jiffy pie crust mix.

“You do the pumpkin from scratch but the crust from a box? That’s so weird. We always do the crust from scratch.”

Well, my friend was right – it was weird – although as with so many other family habits it took an outsider to point out the strangeness of my tribe’s cultural practices.

I make my pie crust from scratch – and with all butter. Yum. I also make my pumpkin pie, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin cheesecake, kaddo bowrani (Afghan pumpkin), and every other pumpkin dish from real pumpkin.

I’ve tasted pumpkin pie from the store. It doesn’t taste right.

But this also means that we don’t have pumpkin-based deliciousness all that often. Let’s face it – it takes time and work to get from a lovely whole pumpkin to the pumpkin mush that’s only one ingredient in a recipe. It would be so much easier to open a can.

I did some reading. I trust Cook’s Illustrated, so I went there first. They claim that canned pumpkin is just fine, and recommended some brands (Libby’s 100% Pure Pumpkin and One-Pie Pumpkin tied for first). I looked on Chowhound.com, another favorite source for foodie musings. Chowhounds seem to go for canned pumpkin as well.

Finally, I ran a test. I looked for the Libby’s canned pumpkin at my local Whole Foods, but came up empty handed, so I bought the 365 Everyday Value store brand. I also bought a sugar pumpkin.

A pumpkin pie would have been the best test. But I was in the mood for pumpkin cake – plus I had plans to eventually make the sage ice cream recommended as an accompaniment (more on that later). I went through the skinning, the seeding, the chopping, and the steaming required to make pumpkin mush from a pumpkin. Then I got out a can opener and in under 30 seconds I had a second quantity of pumpkin mush. I started to hope that the canned pumpkin would win – or even tie. A tie would be just fine.

The canned pumpkin was darker orange and certainly more dense. The steamed pumpkin was clearly a bit watery by comparison. Unadulterated, they both tasted like pumpkin – different from one another, but neither obviously superior.

I mixed up two half-batches of pumpkin cake (dirtying many bowls in the process), and made a divider for my 13” x 9” pan using aluminum foil. Then I marked the from-canned batter with a “C” and the from-fresh batter with a “P” – of sprinkled pumpkin seeds.

Baked, the “C” cake was slightly darker and denser than the “P” cake.

For taste – drum roll, please – IT WAS A TIE.

Different, yes, but neither better than the other. I don’t think I can say I’m 100% won over to canned yet – I think a pie contest is in order first. But I’m definitely leaning…