Simple Vegan Pumpkin Pie (From Scratch)

Andrea Banerjee

The more I attempt scratch recipes, the more I realize that they’re completely feasible for any level of baker/cook, with careful attention to detail and the right ingredients on hand!

Since we seek out vegan versions of so many foods, doing a scratch version at home has been necessary on many occasions – and has turned out to be tastier than store-bought versions about 80 percent of the time. That’s how I’ve now made scratch pancakes, cinnamon buns, doughnuts, and pie! We’re hoping to attempt homemade seitan soon too (so if you have any tips, please share!)

For Thanksgiving, my fiance and I made our own vegan pumpkin pie and it was absolutely delicious. Here are the recipes I chose, and the tips I took away from this kitchen project. I highly recommend using this recipe to make pies and tarts for your fall events, or keeping it bookmarked it for the holiday season!

The Pie Crust

For this one, I chose The Spruce Eats Flaky Vegan Pie Crust Recipe because it checked my box of requiring minimal ingredients, all of which we had on hand at home!

Tips & Take-Aways

• The dough was a little bit dry so when rolled out we noticed a little cracking.  Once you’ve laid it in your pie pan, use a bit of warm water on your finger to patch and smooth cracks in the pastry.
• Always make sure you have a well-floured surface for rolling out pastry dough. It will stick!
• Our biggest mistake was that we didn’t roll the dough out to be thin enough. We ended up with crust about three times as thick as it needed to be. I should have known by how little dough we had left over >.< Ensure that your pie crust is 1/4 inch thick at the very most!
• Lifting rolled out dough into a pie pan can be challenging – remember that you can roll it back onto your rolling pin, then unravel it into the pan!

We baked the pie crust at 350 for about 30 minutes and let it cool completely before moving on to baking the pie itself (with the filling).

The Pumpkin Filling

After some consideration, I chose Yummy Mummy Kitchen’s Vegan Pumpkin Pie recipe for the filling – and it was delicious. We were eating spoonfuls of the filling before the pie went in the oven!

Tips & Take-Aways

• If you are using pumpkin that you stored in your freezer, allow it to thaw overnight before making this filling. We made a second batch where I defrosted my pumpkin in the microwave, and it changed the taste and texture. Fresh pumpkin or fresh from the can is best!
• It’s important to note that the recipe says to bake the pie filling in a pre-baked pie shell. So if you are using the recipe above, you must pre-bake your pie shell!
  In hindsight, it could be because our pie crust was so thick, but for these particular recipes we found the cook time on the raw pastry is longer than that required for the filling. 
• You want to pour your pie filling into a lightly baked (just turning golden) crust that has cooled.
• Monitor closely while in the oven – we baked in increments to check if the crust was burning. Ours didn’t burn at all, and did not require that we cover the edges with tin foil (again, we had a thick crust so this may not be the case for everyone!)
• This filling is perfect for tarts too!

Other than that, simply follow each recipe carefully! And ENJOY – this pie is so tasty! Props to my fiance who did all of the heavy lifting on this recipe!

Advertisement