The pie pan might not look very good, but believe me, every drop of that delicious pumpkin will be cleaned off the plate!
We love our pumpkin pie, always make two at a time exactly the same way as if it had a crust. When we have a "real" pumpkin pie pumpkin, I bake the pumpkin whole in the oven and mash it before freezing. I have found that baking the whole pumpkin is easier than trying to cut up the hard flesh and cooking it in water, which can add too much moisture to my pumpkin puree!
The easiest way to make the pumpkin pie, so that it tastes the freshest and has that heavenly smoothness, is to use Libby's pumpkin and add one's own fresh ingredients including cinnamon, ginger, and cloves, the usual 4 whole eggs, sugar and canned milk. If I do not mind losing the pumpkin flavor, I substitute 1-2 very sweet, ripe, mashed bananas (turned into a white puree in my Ninja) instead of the granulated sugar. If not using bananas as a sweetener, I usually use only 1/2 cup of sugar and two small packets of a sweetener containing stevia. Sometimes I skip the stevia and only use the 1/2 cup sugar.
We do not like the pie when the only sweetener is stevia, but at least a bit of granulated sugar plus the stevia seems to taste the best to us. Per the mashed banana, no other sweetener is needed. The banana works as granulated sugar, granulated sugar counting as a "liquid" in baked goods.
From Halloween, to any holiday, or just for a snack, we love our crust-less pumpkin pie. For special occasions, I make a homemade crust or pull one of my homemade frozen crusts out of the freezer, defrost, roll out, and place into the pie shell for a more traditional pumpkin pie. I like the recipe on the Libby's can of pumpkin the best, but all egg whites work, as does nonfat canned milk, almond, or rice milk. We do not miss the crust and think we are reducing the calories of the pie, although, I must admit, it disappears faster than a pie backed with a wonderful crust!
For the best pie, I like the recipe on the label, but be sure to cut down on the sugar depending on how sweet your family likes pumpkin pie. We can easily become used to using less granulated sugar. I would make a pie and decrease the sugar each time until I came down to about 1/2 cup. We like our pumpkin pie less sweet as it tastes more like delicious homemade pie. The wonderful pumpkin does not need all the sugar suggested, however, the pie does need some sweetness!
