really good vegan pumpkin pie!
9 Nov 2021 05:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneI couldn't resist these cute medium-sized local pumpkins the week before Halloween, so we decided to buy one and make a pie. This weekend we finally got around to doing that with a vegan pumpkin pie recipe - I looked at a few from-scratch recipes that all called for evaporated milk, which is a no-no for me. I only eat lactose-free dairy products, which are fortunately really common in Finland, but as far as I've been able to tell, evaporated milk is purely a sort of semi-rare imported food here and I've never seen a lactose-free version. Rather than hunt around for it, I decided to check out the vegan recipes, and the vegan formula is basically pumpkin puree plus coconut cream or coconut milk (and warming spices). It turned out delicious!
We used The Home Baked Vegan - The Best Vegan Pumpkin Pie on the Internet
Pumpkin pie filling usually gets its texture from evaporated milk, heavy cream, and pureed pumpkin (whether that's in a can or not), more or less - it makes a creamy custard texture by combining the tasty creamy stuff that is also thick and contains fat molecules with the pumpkin puree, which makes it denser and thicker than, say, just a pudding or custard. But because it doesn't include anything like eggs, the substitution of coconut cream (or the gloppy bits of coconut milk) doesn't create a really different texture or any other food chemistry-type problems to solve, if you see what I mean. When you have to find a vegan replacement for eggs, you have to maybe work a bit harder and not every recipe can use the same thing, because of properties eggs have. But with this, one sweet, gloppy, fatty delicious cream product is pretty much like another, just slightly more coconutty. TBH, I can't taste the coconut in the result because of the spices, but I doubt it would have a bad effect even if you could. So this recipe is not an inferior or more difficult vegan option; it's a fairly simple substitution (that happens fortuitously to be vegan and, in my case more importantly, lactose free).
Obviously, because we bought the pumpkin before Halloween, we had to make the pie before Thanksgiving. I mean, if we'd thought to freeze it or stick it in the basement or whatever maybe not, but we had it on the floor by the radiator, so we had no choice. And I've been thinking about pumpkin pie and about Thanksgiving as a result.
I haven't really been bothered about missing Thanksgiving as an expatriate; the last time I tried to make a pumpkin pie - with a can of filling my mom sent in the mail - was probably like fifteen years ago. I guess it has less cultural importance for me than for a lot of other Americans.
I grew up looking on Thanskgiving as a time for family reunions, and I associate it most strongly with going to the museums in Washington DC, because that was where we went for many of my formative years. I've also never been very food-motivated. The blueberry pie and the pumpkin bread were the only two foods I really looked forward to strongly (my mom COULD make them any time, but they were both a bit more work than she'd usually bother with except for a special occasion). Come to think of it, maybe I can find another recipe similar to pumpkin bread to try out (something that doesn't require a pumpkin, ideally). Blueberry pie is already, obviously, not seasonally-dependent.
Anyway, the point is, I can't visit my aunts and unclee and cousins and cousins-once-removed and great-aunt and -uncle for Thanksgiving no matter what I do, because there's not enough time off even if I were independently wealthy and transatlantic travel were simple and easy. And without that, there's not really anything left in Thanksgiving for me to care about (apart from political anger about the holiday and support for the idea of Native American Heritage Day instead). I would enjoy a family get together with my in-laws instead, which will simply wait until Christmas, pandemic restrictions willing, and at least some of them live much close to us here than I ever lived to extended family growing up. In fact, nobody lives farther than 5 hours' drive from us, which is already closer than the closest relatives lived to us (it was about 8 hours to my dad's sister in Tennessee - in that time we could be in Lapland, if we took a train).
We used The Home Baked Vegan - The Best Vegan Pumpkin Pie on the Internet
Pumpkin pie filling usually gets its texture from evaporated milk, heavy cream, and pureed pumpkin (whether that's in a can or not), more or less - it makes a creamy custard texture by combining the tasty creamy stuff that is also thick and contains fat molecules with the pumpkin puree, which makes it denser and thicker than, say, just a pudding or custard. But because it doesn't include anything like eggs, the substitution of coconut cream (or the gloppy bits of coconut milk) doesn't create a really different texture or any other food chemistry-type problems to solve, if you see what I mean. When you have to find a vegan replacement for eggs, you have to maybe work a bit harder and not every recipe can use the same thing, because of properties eggs have. But with this, one sweet, gloppy, fatty delicious cream product is pretty much like another, just slightly more coconutty. TBH, I can't taste the coconut in the result because of the spices, but I doubt it would have a bad effect even if you could. So this recipe is not an inferior or more difficult vegan option; it's a fairly simple substitution (that happens fortuitously to be vegan and, in my case more importantly, lactose free).
Obviously, because we bought the pumpkin before Halloween, we had to make the pie before Thanksgiving. I mean, if we'd thought to freeze it or stick it in the basement or whatever maybe not, but we had it on the floor by the radiator, so we had no choice. And I've been thinking about pumpkin pie and about Thanksgiving as a result.
I haven't really been bothered about missing Thanksgiving as an expatriate; the last time I tried to make a pumpkin pie - with a can of filling my mom sent in the mail - was probably like fifteen years ago. I guess it has less cultural importance for me than for a lot of other Americans.
I grew up looking on Thanskgiving as a time for family reunions, and I associate it most strongly with going to the museums in Washington DC, because that was where we went for many of my formative years. I've also never been very food-motivated. The blueberry pie and the pumpkin bread were the only two foods I really looked forward to strongly (my mom COULD make them any time, but they were both a bit more work than she'd usually bother with except for a special occasion). Come to think of it, maybe I can find another recipe similar to pumpkin bread to try out (something that doesn't require a pumpkin, ideally). Blueberry pie is already, obviously, not seasonally-dependent.
Anyway, the point is, I can't visit my aunts and unclee and cousins and cousins-once-removed and great-aunt and -uncle for Thanksgiving no matter what I do, because there's not enough time off even if I were independently wealthy and transatlantic travel were simple and easy. And without that, there's not really anything left in Thanksgiving for me to care about (apart from political anger about the holiday and support for the idea of Native American Heritage Day instead). I would enjoy a family get together with my in-laws instead, which will simply wait until Christmas, pandemic restrictions willing, and at least some of them live much close to us here than I ever lived to extended family growing up. In fact, nobody lives farther than 5 hours' drive from us, which is already closer than the closest relatives lived to us (it was about 8 hours to my dad's sister in Tennessee - in that time we could be in Lapland, if we took a train).
