With the holiday season in high gear, many of us are feeling a little adventurous in the kitchen as visions of sugar plums and festive treats dance in our heads. Now is the perfect time to expand your cooking skills and step outside of your comfort zone—and pie is the perfect place to start.
If you have the patience to make a gumbo, you have the patience to prepare a pie filling from scratch. Canned filling from the store is usually bland at best and barely edible goo at worst, so why not just leave it on the shelf and dazzle your holiday guests with something homemade? Once you master making your own filling, you’ll never look back.
We’ve compiled recipes and tips for three classic holiday pies for you to try this season. We recommend using each recipe as a guide and adding your own flavors as you go. Best of luck, and happy holidays!
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Pecan Pie
Try this: Brown Eyed Baker’s Pecan Pie
TIPS:
1. Invest in a candy thermometer. Because of its complicated chemistry, monitoring temperatures when baking your pecan pie filling is key to the perfect consistency. It’s done when the core temperature at the center of the pie reaches about 200 degrees.
2. Get it drunk. Add a splash of bourbon or dark rum to your filling for extra flavor and just a little bit of buzz.
3. Don’t make your filling wait. If you’re making your own crust, make it before the filling. If you let the filling stand for too long, it’ll begin to separate before it gets a chance to bake.
Pumpkin Pie
Try this: Mrs. Sigg’s Fresh Pumpkin Pie
TIPS:
1. Choose your pumpkin carefully. Look for a smaller variety called a sugar pumpkin for your filling, and be sure to check for soft spots, peeling skin or loose stems. Those are signs of rot.
2. Roast and puree your own pumpkin. If you’re not sure how, try following this guide. While it’s tempting to just doctor store-bought filling, the only way to be sure your filling is the real deal and free of anything artificial is to do it yourself.
3. Use brown sugar. In almost any holiday pie recipe, leaning on brown sugar over white sugar can’t hurt. Darker sugars add depth and richness of flavor to all fillings, and pumpkin is no exception. Feel free to sub in brown for white in any pie recipe you find.
Apple Pie
Try this: New York Times Cooking’s Apple Pie
TIPS:
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1. Cook before baking. Many pie recipes will tell you to dump a bunch of raw apples into your pie shell, but raw fruit shrinks and releases moisture in the oven, leaving you with a soggy bottom crust and a big gap between your filling and the top crust. Cook the apples down on the stovetop first, then cool before putting the filling into the shell.
2. Spice it up. Don’t stop at cinnamon and sugar. Experiment with spicier seasonings, like ginger, nutmeg, clove and/or allspice. Cooking your filling is a great way to develop richer flavors, so taste and spice as you go. Bonus tip: Use a squeeze of lemon juice to keep a note of brightness.
3. Cultivate some texture. Making fruit filling takes a lot of stirring and patience, like a soup or gumbo. In later stages of cooking, adding sticky liquids like honey or maple syrup and two tablespoons of flour will keep the filling from being runny and hold everything together.