Pumpkin Pie for Passover

This pie/crust has a longish tradition for me, ever since middle school when I had a friend come over and we wanted to make a dessert, but it was Passover (which at that time I observed) – what to do? How about make a pumpkin pie (my favorite) and use matzah for the crust? Genius!!

Simplest crust of all time:
Crumble and soak some matzah (about 3 pieces for a standard pie tin) in water for about a minute
Drain it and then smush it to the sides of a pie tin
– Start in the center and work out.
– Make sure to push down at the corners, otherwise the resulting crust will be really thick there (not bad, just wouldn’t be my choice)
– if you need more for one of the side parts, put extra in the corner and push up (seems to be easier than just trying to get it to stick)
Let it sit out while you make the pie filling! That’s all there is to it.

It’s definitely not the flakey pie crust that you’re used to – its kind of chewy, but I think it’s really fun. Bringing it to a non-traditional Passover Seder tonight, so I’ll let you know the feedback!!

Also I would like to call major attention to the pie filling recipe I used – never have I wanted to lick the pumpkin pie bowl before, but oh my!!!!!

This recipe comes to us from Brooklyn Supper. It originally caught my eye because it calls for black pepper – intriguing!

It also calls for heavy cream thickened with flour, instead of sweetened condensed milk. I of course couldn’t use flour (the Passover thing) so I tried using arrowroot instead.

This worked a little too well! The cream got so thick it was gloppy!! I strained most of it out, and the pie turned out fine, but I think the word-to-the-wise is that you don’t need nearly as much arrowroot as you would flour – I would say maybe a couple teaspoons. And maybe you don’t need to heat it. And maybe you don’t need it at all! All part of the fun of trying something new that you don’t know will work but you really hope it does because you’re bringing the result to a dinner party with strangers!!

Other modifications:
– I used sucanot instead of brown sugar (sucanot is a less processed form of basically the same thing – instead of taking the molasses out to get white sugar and then putting it back in to get brown sugar, you just don’t take it out in the first place.)
– I used powdered sugar instead of regular sugar (this was only because for some reason I have powdered sugar and not regular. But it’s the same thing – if you ever put regular sugar in a coffee grinder, you’ll get powdered!)

Also recommended: make 2. That way you can bring one to your dinner party, and have one for breakfast for the next week! (Yes, that is the plan.)