3 Ingredient Pumpkin Dip Recipe (2024)

FAQs

How do you make pumpkin flavor stronger? ›

Ruth Reichl's Tip: Roast Your Pumpkin Purée

Not only does roasting deepen the flavor of the pumpkin, but it bakes off some of the moisture in the purée, ensuring a more custard-like pie with less risk of a soggy crust.

They are the same product. Both canned pumpkin puree and pie filling are useful, shelf-stable ingredients that can help speed up your kitchen prep time. Just remember that puree is unsweetened, while pie filling contains sugar and spices. This will help you choose the right pumpkin product for your recipes.

Store-bought pumpkin pie mix (sometimes labeled "pumpkin pie filling") is a shortcut for making homemade pumpkin pie. It contains puréed pumpkin plus added spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and cloves. It also contains sugar and other chemical additives.

Pumpkin is notorious for pairing well with warm winter spices – as found in a variety of Moroccan-inspired cuisines. Try incorporating cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, cumin and chilli with your pumpkin dishes for flavour-packed feasts.

The Sugar Pie Pumpkin is often considered the crème de la crème of cooking pumpkins. Its deep orange flesh is sweet, smooth, and creamy, making it perfect for pies, soups, and purees. This culinary gem pairs beautifully with warm spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves, creating irresistible autumnal flavors.

Based on my taste tests, I think that fresh puree would easily elevate any savory pumpkin dish such as soup or pasta. The fresh, unadulterated flavor and fluffy texture would work wonderfully in savory dishes, especially because even “sugar pumpkins” aren't very sweet on their own.

Pumpkin puree can be labeled as 100% pure pumpkin, pumpkin puree, solid pack pumpkin, or simply "pumpkin." Regardless of what it's called, one thing pumpkin puree won't contain is any sort of seasonings or sugar—it's just cooked and mashed squash.

It's thicker, fresher, and sweeter tasting than canned. I used homemade pumpkin puree when baking pumpkin bread this weekend. The pumpkin was so sweet tasting that I was able to reduce the sugar in the recipe by one third.

While the canned pumpkin puree is just canned pumpkin, the Libby "Canned Pumpkin Pie Filling" also has sugar syrup, natural flavoring, salt and spices.

Libby's, the quintessential canned pumpkin brand, uses a proprietary strain of the Dickinson pumpkin variety in their product, which is also often called a Dickinson squash. On Libby's website, it states that their product is 100 percent pumpkin.

Can I use canned pumpkin instead of pumpkin pie filling? ›

It is possible to use regular canned pumpkins to make pies instead of purchasing cans that are specifically labeled as “pumpkin pie mix” or “pumpkin puree”. However, doing so requires additional preparation and may not always yield the desired results.

I like to roast wedges of pumpkin which helps to reduce the moisture content, making it taste richer and sweeter. You can flavour the pumpkin at this point by rubbing it with a spice of choice. Place a couple of halved onions to cook with the pumpkin to either use in the soup or as a garnish.

If the recipe doesn't use enough spice, or if the spices were old enough to have lost much of their flavour, or if the mixture isn't well balanced, then the pie is not going to taste right and could be quite bland.

Cooking down pumpkin purée is similar to browning butter: Water evaporates and the milk solids become flavorful and toasty. For even more flavor, you can add spices (like the celebrated pumpkin pie spice!) to the purée during the cooking step.

Why does my pumpkin bread taste bland? Make sure to follow the recipe exactly. That means—don't leave out the salt, don't cut the amount of sugar, and use the specified amount of cinnamon. This is important because flour is what I like to call a “flavor thief”— it sucks the flavor out of ingredients.