- The first bite of
pumpkin pie of the year, that just hits different. (upbeat music) Cooking from scratch
takes time and effort. But after you've made a
beautiful and delicious dish, you always know the
energy was well worth it. Or it wasn't, 'cause there's
always that little voice in the back of your head screaming, "You could have just bought
this from the store you idiot." So, today we're answering
a very timely and important question, pumpkin pie, should you buy it, or should you cook it? So, Thanksgiving is coming
up, happy Thanksgiving, Harry. Happy Thanksgiving, Ron. And that means pumpkin pie. And that means you are going
to be facing the decision, should you go and just buy
a pumpkin pie from the store or should you make it from scratch? So, I'm going to be going head to head with the best pumpkin pie in the game. This is a Costco pumpkin pie. It only costs $6. It feeds 12 people. That's 50 cents a slice, but I think I got some tricks up my sleeve to make a better pumpkin pie myself. But at the end we're going to determine whether it was all worth it. But for now, I'm going to
go ahead and taste this pie. See if I can decode it. What Costco's doing good. What I can do gooder. Let's dig in. Get yourself some pre-made whipped cream. Throw some on there, what's a pumpkin pie without whipped cream. If we look at it, it's
obviously got this very like factory made pre-fab crust and it looks a little bit crumbly, but I feel like it's going to be wet and dense at the bottom. The first bite of pumpkin pie of the year, that just hits different. So, it's a really like even, uniform, nice and fudgy texture on the pie. It's honestly a little bit grainy. I think if we go a little
bit more custardy on ours, we're going to be more successful. That said, this is a very,
very good pumpkin pie, but certain things that I think we can do to make it even better, we're going to toast up our spices fresh, the step they're probably skipping. It's really going to express
the deep pumpkin spice basic flavor that we really want. And then the crust, I think we can get a much
flakier, crispier crust with a couple of steps. We got a secret weapon in
our, behind, in our microwave. You'll see that later. So, let's make a pie. All right, so the first
step of making a pie, we have to make the crust. Step one, you're going
to want to use flour. So, this is just AP flour and we're just going to get
that into our food processor. And then we are going to
take a small amount of sugar or as I call it sweet salt. And then we're going to
take a little bit of salt as I call it salt sugar. That's confusing. You should need to know how to make this. That was salt and sugar. We have a full recipe in the
description below, by the way. So, we're going to go ahead and we're going to add our
butter a little bit at a time. I'm going to run this, we're going to drop it through
what's called a butter hole, also known as a B hole. So, you're going to
slowly insert the butter into the B hole. You can turn it off. You can pulse it a little bit. And so the reason we have
the butter cut up and cold is that we don't want it to
fully like, mix into the flour. We want to have solid beads
that go into the B hole. When the butter is whole in chunks, it's going to melt and actually
steam through the pie crust. That's the sound it makes when it steams, it goes woo, woo, woo, woo. And it's going to create
like little air pockets that make your dough extra crispy. So, we're going to just
pulse it a little bit. There we go. Let me take this out and just show you what we're working with and what we want to go for. You want little like gravel
sized pieces of butter in there. It shouldn't be pulsed too fine. And you can feel that
your flour is still super, super cold and just get it
all over your workstation. That's the key to this. So, we have all our dry
ingredients pulsed up in here. Now we need to add our wet ingredients. I mentioned I have a
surprised in the microwave, that was vodka, I got to keep
all my vodka in the microwave because when you want
freshly microwave vodka, you can just press add
30 seconds, then boom, you have hot vodka, straight to the dome, but we want this cold. So we set our microwave to cold setting. Don't that means nothing. You want your vodka cold, to be clear. So, we're going to slowly
stream in our wet ingredients. Just drip it right into that B hole. A little bit of water. We're just gonna let it pulse. And then we want a shot of vodka. This is actually a double shot. This is running more about a quarter cup. Eins. There we go. I'm going to alternate vodka and water. We want everything to
slowly, slowly incorporate, but again, make sure
everything is ice cold. Yeah, yeah, there we go. That's the sound that we want. That's the sound that we want. Add the rest of that in. We're just gonna give it a
nice shake for good luck. So, the reason we added vodka in there is because alcohol evaporates
at a lower temperature than water. So, similar to the way the
butter is going to evaporate and create little air
pockets to make your crust extra crispidy and
crunchidy and delicious, vodka is going to do the same thing. So, you don't want any loose flour at the bottom of the mixer. You want your dough to kind
of be a somewhat solid log. That way you can kind of wrap
it up, get it in the fridge and then it'll be good to roll out later. So, we got the doughs out of the fridge. We have them plastic wrapped. We just need one, always a good
idea to have a backup dough, or make another pie, throw
a bunch of turkey and gravy and cranberry sauce into a pie. Make a little turkey pot pie,
make a little hot pocket, which technically is a sandwich. So, I'm gonna go ahead
and unwrap this dough. You want your dough to
be as cold as possible, that way all of it is going
to stay nice and crispy. It's not crispy, now. It's going to stay nice and
crispy when you bake it, the colder it is. So, now we started the
long drawn out process of rolling out. Just fast forward through this part. (upbeat music) Basrootin! Basrootin liked my tweet on Twitter. I think we can get him on the show. (upbeat music) What are we going to
do with the pie crust? So, we are going to crimp it. You saw in the Costco pie, they had those little like
machine factory made patterns. But today we are the machine. We have to be the
factory to make patterns, never throw a knife to yourself, even if it's just a couple of inches. Although I know you want to practice your knife fighting
techniques, don't do it. Thanksgiving is not the time. Although it might be the perfect time. I'm going to leave about an inch around, try and trace it as evenly as possible. All right, we're almost
done cutting this out. Beautiful, although I
did not study geometry, I did study traditional calligraphy. That was for my debutante
ball though, not for school. There can be male debutantes. They're called debutantes,
had a ball and everything. It was great, but everyone was wearing
like the little hats in the back of your head. A lot of like chair dancing. Oh, that's a bar mitzvah. All right so, we have
our circular pie crust. So, now we're just gonna
pop this into the pie plate. You want to make sure
you're very ginger with it. Make sure to try and really
get a lot of surface area. so none of it is sticking to your board. I like to throw my forearm
kind of underneath. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then there's like
a tool that you can use to accomplish that. I don't have it. You're going to get here and you want an even amount on each side to come around the edge of the pie plate. And you want to push
it down into the sides, and sort of fold the crust underneath to give like a little nice ridged, even layer across the top. And so when all the dough is folded over, you're just gonna take one finger. And you're just going to
sort of crimp the dough around that finger to create
these nice little ridges. Beat that Costco! Your $5 rotisserie chickens and your large bags of fruit and nut mix that I really lived off in college. Thank you for that. All right so, we're just going
to finish crimping this up and then we're going to
let it rest in the fridge. And then we've got a dock it. We got to bean it. We got to blind bake it. We got to put our pie in there. And then we got to dump a
whole lot of love in there. Have I not dumped enough love for you yet? So, we have our fully crimped pie crust that has been resting in the fridge. Now we have to do, what is
the process known as docking. Don't urban dictionary it. So, we have a tool called
a docker right here, and all this is going to do, we're going to roll it across the pie. It's going to add little holes, little perforations in
it that is going to give the steam a place to go. So, it doesn't create air
bubbles in your pie crust. You could use a fork to do this,
but if you've got a docker, do some docking, you know, So, I'm just going to roll that across. I get holes all across it. We're using beans as
pie weights here here, we're going to let this rest on there as we blind bake our crust. Now a blind bake refers to you
putting the crest in the oven to cook before you actually fill it. For something like a fruit
pie I wouldn't do that, because the longer you cook a fruit pie, the more sugars are going
to develop, et cetera. But for pumpkin pie, which
is essentially a custard pie, the filling is very temperamental. So, it is very time specific. So we need to time it right. That's why we're blind baking. So we're going to blind
bake it for about 12 minutes with the pie weights, then remove that. Then keep going. Oh and the oven is at about 350. It's a South Park, from
one episode of South Park. - [VOICE] Put the pie in the oven! - Yeah, no, Ben, we're
gonna need about 350. Now we have to make the
pumpkin pie filling. So, we're just using canned pumpkin. I've tried making it
before with fresh pumpkin, but it kind of sucks, because canned pumpkin
is not actually pumpkin. We're gonna, oh crap, dude, should we do that on the podcast? - [Stevie] You can talk about it now. - Wait, you don't want to talk about it with me on the podcast? - [Stevie] I do, but like-- - Our podcast's called
A Hot Dog is a Sandwich, that comes out on Wednesday,
wherever you get your podcasts. - [Stevie] Talk about it a little bit. - Okay, so canned pumpkin is actually made from something that is
called a Dickinson squash, the company Libby's,
specifically bred this variety of pumpkin to be better for pies. So, like don't go through
the effort of using a whole pumpkin yourself, it's going to come out kind of watery and a little bit stringy. So, a thing that we
can do to make this pie better than Costco, is
toasting up our spices. So, I'm using pre-made pumpkin pie spice. All we need to do is add
that to a pan on low heat. I'm just going to toast it up, just to get it a little bit fragrant before we add it to our pies. And then we're going to
take our pumpkin puree and we're just going to, and then we are going to
add evaporated milk as well. You gotta stick your thumb
right in it when you do. That's the technique,
the sweat from your thumb will actually season
your pie a little bit. So, we add that evaporated
milk right in there. And then we're also going
to add in brown sugar and white sugar. Brown sugar is going to give you that little bit of molassesy taste to it, but you don't want too much of that to really overpower the spices. And then salt. And then we're just gonna
go in and whisk this up. You want to always whisk your sugar with a fair amount of the wet ingredients, because that way it is
going to actually dissolve. So, we're also going to be adding in a little bit of maple syrup. Maple to me is such like a fun. Maple to me is such a fun fall flavor. Went right to Anya Garden on that. We're going to whisk in the maple syrup I really love that combination. We're also going to add
in a little bit of flour. That's just going to
help tighten up our pie. Kind of the same theory about like adding a little bit of flour
into a cheesecake, right? It's just going to absorb
some of that excess moisture so you can still keep it
nice and custardy and eggy and all that deliciousness with just that little bit of structure to really hold it all together. We're going to take all
of our toasted spices, make sure you give the pan a nice flap, really get it in there. Then you're just going
to whisk that together. And you probably noticed, I
got these little things here. It's sort of like, I don't know what you call
it like an unborn fetus, but of a chicken. So, it's really exciting. So, I'm going to crack
these in individually because I don't like
to do at the beginning because sometimes the
whites can kind of like get stringy and you don't
have them all incorporated in. We're going to crack the eggs
in one at a time and whisk. All right. And you'll notice this looks
very liquidy right now, but once all those sugars tighten, once the flower starts to
absorb some of that moisture. All right and then one last ingredient. Speaking of beans, vanilla
beans from Madagascar. I'm just gonna go ahead and
drop in about a half teaspoon of that in there. To me vanilla and almost
any baking recipe, just sort of like heightens
the flavors of anything. It's almost like seasoning
things with salt. It's just that little kind of baseline that you get in the background. It's that sort of
perfumey pheromonic smell. Why do I describe
everything in weird terms? So, now I'm going to take this and all we're going to do
is dump it into our crust. If you see our crust, it's got like the tiniest
bit of golden brown on it. This is after that blind bake, it is nice and flush against the bottom. We're going to add the custard to it. And it's going to bake
for about 70 minutes and that should create the
perfect thermal equilibrium to have a set and cooked custard and a perfectly golden
brown, delicious crust. I like to leave about a centimeter of room between the crust and the filling. 'Cause I do love that little
bite of naked crest at the end. So, we're going to go ahead and put this in the oven
for about 70 minutes. I'm going top rack on
it, not like super top. So, we've got the Costco
pie here and you will notice that I never took my pie out of the oven. That is because we had to
let it set up for six hours. You'll also see the Costco
pie is considerably bigger than our pie, which, she looks gorgeous. Look at her glow. So, you could make the
judgment on looks alone. That like this is bigger
and more impressive, but we've put so much love and
care and attention to this. This cost $7 and 28 cents to make, which leaves it at 91 cents per serving, compared to 50 cents per serving. But cost is not the only factor. This is about taste, baby. This is about all that love and flavor rolling around across your tongue, through the back of your palette and the other parts of the
mouth that I didn't mention, like the teeth. So, we're going to go. What I'm saying is I'm
going to slice these up and try them. Throw a little bit of cream on there. Dust a little invisible cinnamon on there. Hell yeah. All right, Costco pie. We know what this tastes like. Just a little refresher. Still pretty dang good pie. Flavors are a little bit muted. Crust is a little bit
kind of chewy and gummy. And now for ours, golly,
unbelievable looking. Like the perfect to me
crust to filling ratio. Yup. The flavors are absolutely paying off. It is the texture to me. That is the biggest thing. You can actually see the
different textures here. You see, this is kind of crumbly. Almost got that sandy texture. And then this, which is just so smooth. The spices are so much more
pronounced in this one. And the crust holds up so much better. You get that textural
contrast of silken custard to crispidy crunchidy, crustady. I am absolutely in love
with the pie that we made, but that said, I have so many biases. I know the time, I know the price, I know how much love I put into there. We need to take all those
biases out of the equation. That's why we are asking
some blind taste testers from the Mythical Crew who
don't know nothing about food to see if they can taste the difference. And which one they prefer. So, let's just, what do we do? Just send a van, throw them in there? Annaliese, you are our first
blind taste tester today. Nod if you understand. Nod diagonally if you understand. Yeah, that's good. That's good. Davin, before us, there are two pies. We have pie A and pie B. Nod if you understand. - I cannot see. - Chase? - Yeah. - Okay, he cannot see. He would have reached out and
grabbed that if he could see. Oh yeah, I'm going to
feed you a bite of pie A. And then I'll ask you
a series of questions. It's important that you
answer the questions as honestly as possible. - I feel the stress of
like a glasses appointment where if you don't answer right, your glasses are gonna turn out bad. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why I don't go to doctors. - Okay. - Open, there. Get it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's nice. It's like feeding a horse. All right. Think about it. Let the flavors germinate. What do you like about this pie? - Oh, very soft. - Cinnamon is very strong though. - I really likes the
pumpkin pie part of it. Like versus the crust. There's the pumpkin. There's the, I don't
know what the two parts of the pie are called. - The filling! - It tastes good. Tastes like fall. - What do you dislike about this pie? - I think it's too gooey. - This one is kind of breaking apart a little too much in my mouth. - I think I didn't like, the crust mushed in with
the pie part, so easily. Do we have whipped cream? - Yes. Do you want some whipped
cream straight to the dome? - Yeah. This is nice whipped cream. There it is. On a scale of one to 10. How flaky would you describe this crust? - Five. - Eight. - One. - On a scale of one to 10. How creamy is the filling? - It was very creamy, eight. - Seven. - Six. How perfectly spiced is the pie? - An eight. It's really well spaced, but
I can use a little bit more. - I think I would spice score it at six. - Eight, could be more. - Is this pie a Carrie,
a Samantha or a Miranda? - I don't know. - Okay, so let me tell you. So Carrie, right? She's got a job she absolutely loves. (upbeat music) - The description for this pie is like, doesn't step out of the comfort zone and is like getting like
very like, I don't know. - Charlotte, the pie is a Charlotte. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's the perfect answer. - Okay. - It's Carrie, that's the, yeah, it feels like a Carrie to me. - I think this is Mr. Big. - That's a good reference. That's good to know. He doesn't deserve you, frankly. On a scale of one to 10, how would you rate this pie overall? - Oh boy. Ooh, this is a big one. That's a seven. - Five. - A seven. I will now feed you a bite of pie B. in three, two, I like to surprise. - All right. - Going into the hanger. - Whoa, very different. - The crust didn't just like form in with the pie filling. So, I liked that I could taste both. - I like the filling and I really do think there's a little bit more spice in there or maybe just a different blend of spice. - Is there anything you can identify that you dislike about this pie? - I will say there needs
to be a bit more cinnamon. - I dislike this crust more. The other crust was better. - How flaky is the crust. - The crust, 10. - 10. - Five. - On a scale of one to 10, how creamy is this filling? - Eight. - 10. It's very creamy. I like it a lot. - Eight. - How perfectly spiced is this pie? - Nine. - Nine. - Is this a Carrie, a
Samantha or a Miranda? - Whoever won the Emmy's. - I believe that was Sarah
Jessica Parker as Carrie. - I think it's a Miranda
because I think it's just like, you know, I am what I am and this is exactly what
I want with my life. - She shouldn't have to
settle if she doesn't want to. - No, not at all. - I just think that pumpkin pie in general is not this like
adventurous, flirty, fun pie, which makes me think Miranda. - What would you rate this
pie overall from one to 10? - I would give it an eight. - 10. - 10 out of 10. - I think I'm going to give, B an eight. - Wow, holy farting shat bills, we got the numbers in from our taste test. So, everyone preferred the homemade pie. It outscored the Costco pie 26 to 19. Honestly, I thought it
would have been closer than that because I do
love the Costco pie. But when I tasted the home
made one one next to it, it was clear that this was flakier. It was creamier. It was spicier. And all three of our blind
taste testers confirmed that. Now taste is not the only factor here. We talked about this pie is $6 for a pie that feeds 12 people. We spent $7 and 28 cents to
make this pie that feeds eight. So, per serving the homemade
pie is actually more expensive, almost twice as expensive, probably cause we poured
some liquor into the crust, but that's what made it so much flakier. Also homemade pie took about
six hours and 45 minutes, when you factor everything
into the equation. Whereas the Costco pie,
you just had to wait in the 45 minute hellacious line, trying to beat off someone. Don't beat off someone at Costco, trying to beat someone away with a stick who's trying to grab the last pie. So, those are both two factors. At the beginning of the
episode, we posed the question, pumpkin pie, should you buy it? Or should you cook it? If you're someone who really enjoys baking and enjoys knowing that people
tasted your personal touch in this pie, the taste
really does come through. So for me, pumpkin pie, should you buy it? Or should you cook it? You should cook it. Absolutely. The taste was there. And we saw that in the blind taste test. I saw it with my non blind taste test. Absolutely. This is a fantastic pie. That said if you just want to
go out and buy a Costco pie, cause you know, you got
stuff to do, I get it. Life's busy. It's still a heck of a pie. I got nothing but love for Costco and I can't compete with
them in free samples. I am selling a TV though
at a very reasonable price. So, find me at Facebook
Marketplace, not a scam, Maybe a scam. Thank you so much for stopping
by the Mythical Kitchen. We've got new videos out every week and we got new episodes of our podcast. The hot dog is a Sandwich,
out every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts. Hit us up on Instagram @mythicalkitchen, with pictures of your mythical dishes, under the hashtag dreams become food. I'll see you next time. Happy Thanksgiving. Eat some pie. Get as messy as you want in your kitchen when you have the Mythical Kitchen towel. Available now at mythical.com.
