Baked to Pie-Fection: This Is What You Call Squash Goals

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The end of the year is the holiday season, and the time for house parties, brunches, and any excuse to get together to wine and dine. As any good hostess can tell you, guests should never arrive empty-handed to a house party. One of the easiest things to bring is a good pie for dessert, and one can never have too many pies.

Nuo Hotel Beijing is known for its extravagant buffets, and pastry chef Nick Xu fills the N’Joy dessert station with at least 20 pies along with other cakes, candies, and tarts every week. Here he shares with beijingkids his all-time favorite, the classic pumpkin pie. One of the best things about this recipe is that once you’ve mastered the basics of pie-making you can easily get creative and start coming up with your own variations of fillings.

The Crust

Ingredients 

• 1,200g butter
• 600g icing sugar
• 300g egg
• 1,800g cake flour

Instructions

1. Combine all the ingredients together in a big mixing bowl and mix well.

2. Roll the dough out into sheets and let them rest in the fridge for about 15 minutes. This will make it easier to transfer into the baking pan.

3. Transfer the crust into the baking pan and make small holes on the bottom with a fork. This will allow heat to pass through the crust more evenly when baking.

4. Prep your pie crust by baking it for 15 minutes at 180 degrees C.

Pie Filling

Ingredients 

• 450g pumpkin purée
• 75g egg yolk
• 50g egg white
• 80g sugar
• ½ cup whipping cream
• 2g ground cinnamon
• 2g nutmeg

Instructions 

1. Combine all your ingredients together and mix well.

2. Strain the pumpkin purée mixture into a large bowl. This will remove any chunks and give you a much smoother texture.

3. Fill the pumpkin purée into the pie crust.

Baking

1. Bake at 160 degrees C for 30 minutes.

2. Depending on your oven the cooking time will vary. Check your pie after 30 minutes. If the pumpkin purée is still runny, put your pie back in the oven. Continue checking on it every 5 minutes until your pumpkin purée becomes solid.

3. Let your pie cool down to room temperature before slicing. Enjoy!

Pro Tips:

1. To avoid a soggy bottom crust, prep the pie crust by baking just the crust at 180 degrees C for about 15 minutes and then letting it cool.

2. If you’re using fresh pumpkin, “cook” the purée and then let it cool down before filling your pie crusts. Simply letting your pumpkin purée come to a bubble for about 5 minutes will remove any of the raw pumpkin flavor and give your pie more depth.

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Photos: Mina Yan

This article appeared in the beijingkids November 2019 Beijing Baba issue.

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