Baking Fresh Pumpkins

By Kathryn Washburn Breighner

If you don't already know it, there is a serious shortage of canned pumpkin this year due to cool, wet weather in parts of the country that grow pumpkins. There are no cans of pumpkins in the stores this Thanksgiving season so if you want a pumpkin pie, now is the time to buy fresh pumpkins so that you can bake them and make pumpkin puree.

The canned pumpkin shortage does not impact me: I always make my Thanksgiving pies from fresh pumpkins. There is no comparison in flavor; fresh pumpkin is the preferred ingredient for pies in our house.

The first necessity is to buy pie pumpkins not a carving pumpkin. Not all pumpkins are created equal! Carving pumpkins are thicker and when baked, the result is watery and stringy. A pie pumpkin is smaller, not more than 8-10 inches tall, with thin skins. If the pumpkins aren't labeled, ask.

Our farmer's markets sell pie pumpkins and when I purchased four last week, the sales clerk commented on the shortage of canned pumpkin and said her daughter was bringing canned pumpkin from Missouri when she comes for Thanksgiving. I couldn't help myself: you sell pie pumpkins all day and you are having canned pumpkin brought to you?

Wash the pumpkins, place on a cookie sheet and put into a 350 degree oven. Bake about 50 minutes until a knife pierces easily through the flesh.

Remove from the oven, cut open and cool. Then scoop out the seeds and inner flesh and what remains is what will soon become a pie.  You can remove the pumpkin and mash with a potato masher or run through a food mill. I used a food mill: I scooped out the pumpkin flesh and dropped into a food mill set over a mixing bowl. A few turns of the food mill handle and creamy pumpkin puree fills the bowl.

Because pumpkin cannot be safely canned at home, I put 2 cups of pumpkin puree in quart size freezer bags and put in the freezer. We are traveling to Annapolis for Thanksgiving, so we'll put the freezer bags in the cooler--along with the turkey that will be brining as we drive.

If you want a pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, you'd better find some pie pumpkins in the next few weeks before they disappear from the shelves, too!