Alana
I was reading a little bit about making pumpkin pie from scratch, and came across a recipe for this pie. Apparently pumpkin flesh is quite watery, making pies make from scratch quite inconsistent. Butternut squash on the other hand contains less water, making the flesh more consistent for baking. Neat! We had a butternut squash kicking around the house, so this was a done deal.
I think the most challenging part of this pie for me, was actually cooking my squash. Usually when I cook squash I use my oven; I was under a little bit of time pressure so I decided I would cook my butternut squash in the microwave. This turned out to take just as long, thanks to microwaves ability to cook things unevenly. It probably took me around 30-40 minutes to cook the squash in the microwave, which probably the same amount of time it would have been to bake the darn thing.
So thick and pasty!
Reading through recipes, I noticed a few called for 3 cups of mashed squash, or 1 ½ squashes. It seemed kind of lame to use half a squash, so I just cooked 1 and it turned out to be a perfect 3 cups! (For reference, I think the squash I used was about 1.2 kg).
For the crust I used the same old recipe from pastry school, but really any will work. I didn’t pre-bake my crust, but I think next time I will give it a go because I didn’t find the bottom of the pie to be as flaky as it usually is.
For the trim I rolled out my dough again and cut 3 long strips to braid together. It’s a look I’ve seen several times on pinterest etc, but have yet to try myself. It was super easy! You can’t quite get a long enough braid to go around the whole outer edge, so you will most definitely need to make 2 braids. It would have been nice to cut out some leaves or acorns to strategically place over the ends of the braids, but I don’t actually have very many cookie cutter shapes… I decided not to worry about it.
Oven ready!
Overall this pie turned out quite well. I’d say the flavour is quite comparable to pumpkin pie, but sweeter. I think serving it with some fresh whipped cream would cut the sweetness a bit, but I’d probably reduce the amount of sugar in this recipe for the future. It also cracked quite a bit in the middle, but I don’t really want to judge it too harshly because my oven did some weird things when this pie was in there. I would also be less lazy while preparing my filling, because I just threw everything into a food processor and hit go… The recipe below is how I plan to prepare my filling in the future.
Butternut Squash Pie
Adapted from Taste of Home
Ingredients
- Enough pie dough to make 1 pie
- 1 ¼ cup (270 g) granulated sugar
- 1 butternut squash (1.2 kg, should be 3 cups when mashed)
- 4 ½ tsp cornstarch
- 2 tsp cinnamon
- ½ tsp ginger
- ½ tsp nutmeg
- ¼ tsp cloves
- ½ cup butter, soft/melted
- 2 eggs
- ¼ cup milk
- 3 tsp vanilla extract
Directions
- Prepare you pie dough as directed by your recipe (I do mine the night before).
- Cook your butternut squash, however you would like. In the mean time whisk the sugar, cornstarch and spices in a small bowl, and the butter, eggs, milk and vanilla in another.
- Scrape out the flesh of your squash and puree in a food processor until smooth. Add in the dry ingredient mixture and mix until combines; repeat with the wet ingredients.
- Roll out your pie dough and line your pie dish. Braid and other embellishments optional, but encouraged 🙂 To attach the braid, brush the edge of your pie dough with water and gently press it on.
- Pour your filling into the pie pastry and bake in the oven at 350 degrees F (conveniently already hot from cooking the squash) for around 35-40 minutes, or until the pie has a relatively uniform wabble. Cover the edges with tin foil for the first 15 minutes or so of baking to prevent over browning of the crust, if you care about that sort of thing.
- Let cool completely before slicing. Serve and enjoy 🙂
Chateau Gateau 