Clueless cooking: how to bake a pumpkin pie

The ding of the oven goes off as the scent of a freshly baked pumpkin pie fills the room. The pie is brought to an intricately decorated table with white doily placemats and a seven pronged candelabra brushed with a metallic finish. Thanksgiving is about to begin.

But not in our households. We usually just eat Cup Noodles and microwave popcorn. 

For a change, we wanted to embrace a small part of American tradition by cooking our very own Thanksgiving dish. Since we love to make our lives even more stressful, we challenged ourselves to make something without a recipe and without any prior knowledge: pumpkin pie.

Neither of us had the slightest idea on how to make a pie, so we turned to Wikipedia, browsing through the site to see which ingredients to use. 

We were told to use flour, water and butter for the crust and  pumpkin purée, condensed milk, eggs and spices such as nutmeg and cinnamon for the pumpkin filling. When we went to Sprouts to look for ingredients, the first thing we saw in the store was a stand containing most of the ingredients we needed to make a pumpkin pie. The store was practically telling us that this was a brilliant idea. 

We found all the ingredients that we needed except for pie pan, which we ended up buying at Smart & Final. 

For our first attempt of baking, we were incredibly clueless. With only a faint background in baking pizza, we put flour and water in first and roughly about 2 tablespoons of butter. It didn’t go so well. The crust was pale, tasteless and looked in no way how it was supposed to. 

After the disappointing sight of our undercooked but still burned pastry, we decided to try again. This time, we put the milk and flour in first and added a couple more tablespoons of butter. The crust looked better, and we sprinkled some pumpkin spice onto the dough. A little bit too much, apparently.

As it baked, we made the filling. After pouring a spoonful of condensed milk into the pumpkin puree, we added 4 tablespoons of pumpkin spice into the mixture.

And the second the spice landed into the filling, the aroma of Thanksgiving wafted throughout the entire kitchen. That was the moment our entire baking experience changed. Success was so close yet so far.

We opened the oven, and the once hope-filled crust never looked so depressing. It was better than our first one, but that’s a really low standard.

So we caved. We took a quick sneak peek at Allrecipes and changed up the ratio of the ingredients, specifically the amount of butter that we used. Compared to the 2 tablespoons from the first try, we put in 6 tablespoons of butter. 

For the filling, we added half a cup of condensed milk, which was a lot of calories, but worth it. Kind of. The actual pumpkin part of the pie, on the third try, was delicious but had a slightly bitter aftertaste. 

The crust, also on our last attempt, was actually impressive. It had the perfect amount of crumble and was by far one of the best pumpkin pie crusts we have ever tasted.

Our experience had a lot of ups and downs, but in the end, it turned out well. After all, it isn’t the holiday season until you make a couple of questionable pumpkin pies.