A tale of two Pumpkins

Hey guys !

Its Antoinette and its Fall here in the sates and y'know what that means right?! The air is getting cooler the tree's are changing and I watch Tim Burton's films 50% more then the rest of the year. Baking  doesn't feel like I'm sitting in the oven with my cookies cause its over 90 degrees outside. I love Fall its my favorite time of the year.

Fall also gives me my favorite flavor in practically everything now, there is pumpkin in my coffee, candles  and of course my baked goods. Thought I have only starting baking with pumpkin for about a year or so.
It started with a seasonal dog treat flavor then a butter cream flavor and just yesterday I finally made my own pumpkin pie from scratch for a client.

This start's a tale of two pumpkins, one which was a normal sugar pumpkin that I purchased at a farmers market. The other was this bizarre odd pumpkin my mother bought at a local chain food market.
The normal pumpkin was everything a sugar pumpkin should be, not to big in size a bit tender fleshed when opened with a decent amount of seeds. A sugar pumpkin is small in size but it provides a nice amount of meat that can be used for a few things.  Instead of one can usually only makes one pie .

Pumpkin X aka odd mutant pumpkin bought from a food market. It was smaller then the one I bought and its outside was hard and felt like one of those plastic carving pumpkin. Words can not describe how hard this little pumpkin was . It took four different knives and three different people to crack this little sucker open and when it was open the flesh was hard and had more seeds then the pumpkin I bought. After roasting it with the other pumpkin we tasted them both. The sugar pumpkin I bought tasted as it should but the other pumpkin X tasted almost like butter nut squash . I could not use that for baking at all  so I just added some butter to flesh (which wasn't that much to begin with) and a few spices and served it as a side for dinner .Oh and by the way even after roasting at 400 degrees for about 30 minutes the out side of this things was still hard!  

The Sugar pumpkin became an awesome pie and will become even more delicious pumpkin baked goodness. I'll share some recipes in my next post.

Here are some pics:

 Sugar pumpkin bought from the farmers market. This is after it was roasted. The skin pealed right off. Clean.

 This is how the inside was. Cleaner and fewer seeds.

 This is pumpkin X. You can see how the other sugar pumpkin the skin shriveled with the meat. In this one you can see the skin stay hard and in the same place while the meat shriveled. Skin was still as hard as a rock.

 Here is the inside of the store bought pumpkin. It has more seeds for being a smaller pumpkin than the other one.

This is the pie before and after. It was made with a home made pumpkin custard and a sour cream dough. We use this dough with a few other foods that we like to make and because is such a nice, melts in your mouth, moist dough, we though it would be a great pairing with the richness of the pumpkin custard.