Pumpkin Groceries
A decade ago, Starbucks debuted a seasonal beverage that it is not an exaggeration to state achieved cultural influence: the pumpkin spice latte. The PSL, as both adherents and register captains call it, has come to symbolize autumn and, as any Starbucks barista, district manager, or stock holder will tell you, is one of the most popular items that Starbucks sells. From there it seemed that pumpkin and pumpkin spice flavored food and drink appeared in increasing numbers every autumn, not just in coffeehouses but in restaurants and grocery stores.
The PSL was not so much an inauguration as an invigoration. Pumpkin has long been a plentiful autumn crop, and everyone from bakers to brewers to confectioners have long utilized it to shore up business come autumn. As anyone who's been to the grocery store in the last few weeks knows, the pumpkin groceries have arrived on the shelves. In this season of building up the pantry, now is a good time for us homekeepers to assess the annual crop of pumpkin groceries. But before we do, let's learn how our pumpkin flavored food and drink got that way.
The best way, of course, is from pumpkins. Pumpkins are a boon crop for farmers: relatively easy to grow, with a high yield per acre both agriculturally and financially. Though there have been years where the pumpkin yield has been compromised, most of the time these squashes are an easy grow and a profitable sell. From plenitude alone, we should expect food and drink that is labeled pumpkin to contain real pumpkin. Indeed, for many products, there is no reason to accept those that do not contain one hundred percent pumpkin with no artificial coloring or flavoring. These include pumpkin filled pasta, pumpkin ale, and pumpkin purée.
For other products, though, if you are going to eat or drink them, you are going to have to accept that their pumpkin or pumpkin-spice flavor profile is the result of a food chemist's expertise rather than Mother Nature's bounty. This is more common than we often understand, for many of the foodstuffs we consume, from potato chips to ice cream, rely on flavor extracts, often heavily and sometimes solely. This is especially true of pumpkin, which has a specific flavor profile that consumers expect to encounter with not much room for variation. Ironically, that flavor profile is mostly about warm-sweet spices and a buttery-nutty quality that is not all that close to the elements that are found in actual pumpkin but evokes those found in pumpkin baked goods, notably pumpkin pie and pumpkin bread. Accordingly, food labels are required to distinguish between actual pumpkin and pumpkin flavoring as ingredients. That is also why there is a distinction, often broadly interpreted, between "pumpkin flavored" and "pumpkin spice flavored."
So noted, but we Americans like our pumpkin spice flavor. Pumpkin and pumpkin spice flavored groceries account for a noticeable chunk of the annual profits of producers, manufacturers, and purveyors of American food and drink, both in the restaurant and in the grocery store. As you build your autumn pantry, here is Urban Home's selective guide to pumpkin groceries. As with all lists and guides at Urban Home Blog, this is not meant to be a comprehensive list but a guide based on my years of experience as a homekeeper and lifestyle writer, and none of these is a compensated endorsement.
The first and most important pumpkin grocery is the most basic one: canned pumpkin purée. Along with apples, pumpkin is the cornerstone of autumn baking. While there's no reason you can't use fresh pumpkin in your kitchen, it is labor intensive (and quite messy) to split, seed and scoop a sugar pumpkin. That said, I did so for years, until I happened to learn that same week and from the original sources that not one but two chefs whose food I admired used canned pumpkin purée in both their baking and savory dishes. I figured if it was good enough for them, it was good enough for me, and after that first experimental pumpkin pie I baked with canned purée turned out to equal or even surpass those I had baked using the colonial practice of splitting, seeding and scooping pumpkins, I have used canned pumpkin in my kitchen and taught my readers and students to use it in theirs.
As we learned when we set up our baking pantry, canned pumpkin is an essential pantry item. You may think that as a home canner, I would put up my own pumpkin purée, but due to its density, pumpkin purée is one food item that cannot be safely home canned. Professional canneries can safely can pumpkin, but you should also know that some off brands supplement the pumpkins in their puree with other squashes. Larger grocery stores and specialty shops with baking areas will have canned pumpkin on the shelves year round, but it may not move during the warm months, and pumpkin purée does expire. Buy two to six cans now to get through autumn and winter, depending on how much baking you do. Remember to get canned pumpkin purée, whose ingredients as verified on the label should be nothing other than one hundred percent pure pumpkin; not pumpkin pie filling. Though I have tried organic canned pumpkin, I find it dissatisfying in taste and texture. In our urban kitchen, we use the stalwarts: Libby's or One Pie canned pumpkin purée.
For years, Thanksgiving guests at our New York City Urban Home stated that, along with the greens and the turkey, coffee and dessert were the offerings they most looked forward to on our Thanksgiving table. Desserts have a strong representation at Urban Home, and one of the first dessert recipes published on Urban Home Blog was for pumpkin cheesecake. From the freezer section, Trader Joe's sells a decent pumpkin cheesecake, but the real showstopper is Pilgrim Joe's pumpkin ice cream. This whole milk ice cream is so densely textured and richly spiced that it is easy to understand why adherents queue up for its first freezer stocking come September. And if you want to make your own pumpkin ice cream, try the recipe in Lou Seibert Pappas' A Harvest of Pumpkins and Squash.
We take our coffee seriously at Urban Home. When we stock our coffee and tea pantry, the flavored coffee we keep on hand is pumpkin coffee. The platinum standard is McNulty's pumpkin spice whole bean coffee, which is available by internet-, telephone- and mail order from this legendary Greenwich Village coffee importer. This well-rounded dessert coffee gives off an enticing pumpkin spice fragrance without the bitter profile that many pumpkin-spice flavored oils can evoke, and has been a hit at every Thanksgiving I have ever hosted. Target's Archer Farms Pumpkin Spice coffee is a strong cup of that same warm, spicy flavor profile. If you prefer to serve regular coffee, Urban Home Blog's recommendations are here. Spike your cup of regular joe with Williams Sonoma Pumpkin Spiced Latte Syrup, which is also nice to have on hand if you make coffeehouse drinks in your home. I am one of those tasters to whom hot milk tastes acrid, so I have to take my coffee black or lighten it chemically. Kroger pumpkin spice coffee creamer reveals that warm-sweet spicy profile discussed above, and has the fewest hair-raising ingredients of any chemical coffee lightener that I'm aware of. If, when you think of coffee creamer, you think of your mom's breakfast table, then Coffee Mate sells a powdered version of their pumpkin spice creamer that is as warm-sweet as you'd expect, without the aftertaste that some experience with the refrigerated product.
Though I will never stop baking cookies nor entreating others to bake them, I understand that packaged cookies are a reality in most American homes. In our urban home, the rule is only to consume those treats that are laden with the least amount of chemical ingredients possible, including a hard and fast moratorium against high fructose corn syrup. And it's a good thing, too, because the superstar of this autumn's cookie aisle is Target's pumpkin cheesecake sandwich cookie. As befits their humble house brand packaging, these cookies are reasonably priced, and they also prove that cost does not equal value and disprove that low cost cannot be the best. Lightly spiced, wonderfully textured cookie wafers hug a dollop of cheesecake filling that is pleasingly textured and flavorful, unlike the slab of sugary cement in the middle of most commercially packaged sandwich cookies. I would overlook most of the commercially prepared pumpkin flavored baking mixes that hit the shelves this year in favor of a box or two of these cookies -- with the time you save away from the cookie sheets, you could bake a loaf of pumpkin bread, even make a batch of pumpkin butter to serve on it.
Pumpkin groceries aren't limited to the baking and coffee aisles. Pumpkin ravioli have been appearing on shelves since around Labor Day. The best pumpkin ravioli is hand made and sold in your local Italian grocery store. One such in New York City is Rafetto's, which does sell to some large specialty stores such as Whole Foods, but be warned that those distinctive red and green latticed boxes go fast. Most local Italian groceries should have pumpkin ravioli this time of year, or can advise where to obtain it. Many grocery stores sell either pumpkin- or butternut ravioli. As long as they are packaged fresh and displays no flocking, these pastas should be fine tossed with brown butter and sage or a cream sauce, either as a main course or as a side to accompany chicken or pork.
Finally, after pie and lattes, perhaps the key pumpkin treat of the autumn season is an ice cold pumpkin ale. You can read Urban Home's first round-up of pumpkin ales here. Since I wrote that article, I have tried many additional pumpkin ales, as well as re-trying several of the bottles in the article. Of these, Uinta Punk'n remains the favorite for its deft handling of pumpkin and spice and for a brisk hit of balsam on the finish. Uinta's Oak Jacked Imperial Pumpkin Ale is also noteworthy for a toasty molasses quality and a gorgeous reddish-amber cast that is exactly the color of autumn leaves. Finally, a serious contender for the follow-up article is Weyerbacher Imperial Pumpkin Ale. This low-foam brew offers a buttery haze of malt, pumpkin and spice. It is easy to imagine this beer poured into pewter and served hearthside, and that warmth of evocation is the reason pumpkin satisfies so well autumn after autumn.
The PSL was not so much an inauguration as an invigoration. Pumpkin has long been a plentiful autumn crop, and everyone from bakers to brewers to confectioners have long utilized it to shore up business come autumn. As anyone who's been to the grocery store in the last few weeks knows, the pumpkin groceries have arrived on the shelves. In this season of building up the pantry, now is a good time for us homekeepers to assess the annual crop of pumpkin groceries. But before we do, let's learn how our pumpkin flavored food and drink got that way.
The best way, of course, is from pumpkins. Pumpkins are a boon crop for farmers: relatively easy to grow, with a high yield per acre both agriculturally and financially. Though there have been years where the pumpkin yield has been compromised, most of the time these squashes are an easy grow and a profitable sell. From plenitude alone, we should expect food and drink that is labeled pumpkin to contain real pumpkin. Indeed, for many products, there is no reason to accept those that do not contain one hundred percent pumpkin with no artificial coloring or flavoring. These include pumpkin filled pasta, pumpkin ale, and pumpkin purée.
For other products, though, if you are going to eat or drink them, you are going to have to accept that their pumpkin or pumpkin-spice flavor profile is the result of a food chemist's expertise rather than Mother Nature's bounty. This is more common than we often understand, for many of the foodstuffs we consume, from potato chips to ice cream, rely on flavor extracts, often heavily and sometimes solely. This is especially true of pumpkin, which has a specific flavor profile that consumers expect to encounter with not much room for variation. Ironically, that flavor profile is mostly about warm-sweet spices and a buttery-nutty quality that is not all that close to the elements that are found in actual pumpkin but evokes those found in pumpkin baked goods, notably pumpkin pie and pumpkin bread. Accordingly, food labels are required to distinguish between actual pumpkin and pumpkin flavoring as ingredients. That is also why there is a distinction, often broadly interpreted, between "pumpkin flavored" and "pumpkin spice flavored."
So noted, but we Americans like our pumpkin spice flavor. Pumpkin and pumpkin spice flavored groceries account for a noticeable chunk of the annual profits of producers, manufacturers, and purveyors of American food and drink, both in the restaurant and in the grocery store. As you build your autumn pantry, here is Urban Home's selective guide to pumpkin groceries. As with all lists and guides at Urban Home Blog, this is not meant to be a comprehensive list but a guide based on my years of experience as a homekeeper and lifestyle writer, and none of these is a compensated endorsement.
The first and most important pumpkin grocery is the most basic one: canned pumpkin purée. Along with apples, pumpkin is the cornerstone of autumn baking. While there's no reason you can't use fresh pumpkin in your kitchen, it is labor intensive (and quite messy) to split, seed and scoop a sugar pumpkin. That said, I did so for years, until I happened to learn that same week and from the original sources that not one but two chefs whose food I admired used canned pumpkin purée in both their baking and savory dishes. I figured if it was good enough for them, it was good enough for me, and after that first experimental pumpkin pie I baked with canned purée turned out to equal or even surpass those I had baked using the colonial practice of splitting, seeding and scooping pumpkins, I have used canned pumpkin in my kitchen and taught my readers and students to use it in theirs.
As we learned when we set up our baking pantry, canned pumpkin is an essential pantry item. You may think that as a home canner, I would put up my own pumpkin purée, but due to its density, pumpkin purée is one food item that cannot be safely home canned. Professional canneries can safely can pumpkin, but you should also know that some off brands supplement the pumpkins in their puree with other squashes. Larger grocery stores and specialty shops with baking areas will have canned pumpkin on the shelves year round, but it may not move during the warm months, and pumpkin purée does expire. Buy two to six cans now to get through autumn and winter, depending on how much baking you do. Remember to get canned pumpkin purée, whose ingredients as verified on the label should be nothing other than one hundred percent pure pumpkin; not pumpkin pie filling. Though I have tried organic canned pumpkin, I find it dissatisfying in taste and texture. In our urban kitchen, we use the stalwarts: Libby's or One Pie canned pumpkin purée.
For years, Thanksgiving guests at our New York City Urban Home stated that, along with the greens and the turkey, coffee and dessert were the offerings they most looked forward to on our Thanksgiving table. Desserts have a strong representation at Urban Home, and one of the first dessert recipes published on Urban Home Blog was for pumpkin cheesecake. From the freezer section, Trader Joe's sells a decent pumpkin cheesecake, but the real showstopper is Pilgrim Joe's pumpkin ice cream. This whole milk ice cream is so densely textured and richly spiced that it is easy to understand why adherents queue up for its first freezer stocking come September. And if you want to make your own pumpkin ice cream, try the recipe in Lou Seibert Pappas' A Harvest of Pumpkins and Squash.
We take our coffee seriously at Urban Home. When we stock our coffee and tea pantry, the flavored coffee we keep on hand is pumpkin coffee. The platinum standard is McNulty's pumpkin spice whole bean coffee, which is available by internet-, telephone- and mail order from this legendary Greenwich Village coffee importer. This well-rounded dessert coffee gives off an enticing pumpkin spice fragrance without the bitter profile that many pumpkin-spice flavored oils can evoke, and has been a hit at every Thanksgiving I have ever hosted. Target's Archer Farms Pumpkin Spice coffee is a strong cup of that same warm, spicy flavor profile. If you prefer to serve regular coffee, Urban Home Blog's recommendations are here. Spike your cup of regular joe with Williams Sonoma Pumpkin Spiced Latte Syrup, which is also nice to have on hand if you make coffeehouse drinks in your home. I am one of those tasters to whom hot milk tastes acrid, so I have to take my coffee black or lighten it chemically. Kroger pumpkin spice coffee creamer reveals that warm-sweet spicy profile discussed above, and has the fewest hair-raising ingredients of any chemical coffee lightener that I'm aware of. If, when you think of coffee creamer, you think of your mom's breakfast table, then Coffee Mate sells a powdered version of their pumpkin spice creamer that is as warm-sweet as you'd expect, without the aftertaste that some experience with the refrigerated product.
Though I will never stop baking cookies nor entreating others to bake them, I understand that packaged cookies are a reality in most American homes. In our urban home, the rule is only to consume those treats that are laden with the least amount of chemical ingredients possible, including a hard and fast moratorium against high fructose corn syrup. And it's a good thing, too, because the superstar of this autumn's cookie aisle is Target's pumpkin cheesecake sandwich cookie. As befits their humble house brand packaging, these cookies are reasonably priced, and they also prove that cost does not equal value and disprove that low cost cannot be the best. Lightly spiced, wonderfully textured cookie wafers hug a dollop of cheesecake filling that is pleasingly textured and flavorful, unlike the slab of sugary cement in the middle of most commercially packaged sandwich cookies. I would overlook most of the commercially prepared pumpkin flavored baking mixes that hit the shelves this year in favor of a box or two of these cookies -- with the time you save away from the cookie sheets, you could bake a loaf of pumpkin bread, even make a batch of pumpkin butter to serve on it.
Pumpkin groceries aren't limited to the baking and coffee aisles. Pumpkin ravioli have been appearing on shelves since around Labor Day. The best pumpkin ravioli is hand made and sold in your local Italian grocery store. One such in New York City is Rafetto's, which does sell to some large specialty stores such as Whole Foods, but be warned that those distinctive red and green latticed boxes go fast. Most local Italian groceries should have pumpkin ravioli this time of year, or can advise where to obtain it. Many grocery stores sell either pumpkin- or butternut ravioli. As long as they are packaged fresh and displays no flocking, these pastas should be fine tossed with brown butter and sage or a cream sauce, either as a main course or as a side to accompany chicken or pork.
Finally, after pie and lattes, perhaps the key pumpkin treat of the autumn season is an ice cold pumpkin ale. You can read Urban Home's first round-up of pumpkin ales here. Since I wrote that article, I have tried many additional pumpkin ales, as well as re-trying several of the bottles in the article. Of these, Uinta Punk'n remains the favorite for its deft handling of pumpkin and spice and for a brisk hit of balsam on the finish. Uinta's Oak Jacked Imperial Pumpkin Ale is also noteworthy for a toasty molasses quality and a gorgeous reddish-amber cast that is exactly the color of autumn leaves. Finally, a serious contender for the follow-up article is Weyerbacher Imperial Pumpkin Ale. This low-foam brew offers a buttery haze of malt, pumpkin and spice. It is easy to imagine this beer poured into pewter and served hearthside, and that warmth of evocation is the reason pumpkin satisfies so well autumn after autumn.
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