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A number of people in my family cannot have dairy or conventional wheat (including me), but can tolerate certain amounts of einkorn. In preparation for Thanksgiving I wanted to find a good option for pumpkin pie that uses an einkorn crust and a creamy filling without the dairy.

How I Made an Einkorn Pumpkin Pie

Please note: You’ll need to start a day in advance if you want to make the sugared cranberries!

The Crust

An einkorn pumpkin pie obviously needs an einkorn crust! For this I turned to Lisa at Farmhouse on Boone. Her recipe for einkorn pie crust uses butter, which I just can’t do, so I found a workaround. The recipe calls for frozen, unsalted butter. Instead I used Earth Balance soy-free buttery spread.

I weighed out the amount needed using my digital kitchen scale, then spread it onto waxed paper and popped it into the freezer until frozen. It worked fine! I do feel like the Earth Balance will re-warm more quickly than regular butter, so you will need to work quickly to avoid it becoming too soft. Earth Balance also makes baking sticks so you could easily freeze one of those.

I split the dough into two sections, but instead of using the second half to top the pie, I rolled it out and cut out my shapes – I’ll get to that in a minute!

The Filling

For the einkorn pumpkin pie filling I decided on a recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction. Obviously I didn’t use the dough part of her recipe, but I followed her instructions for making sugared cranberries and then tweaked her filling recipe: In place of heavy cream I skimmed the top creamy layer off a can of full fat unsweetened coconut milk (I had just enough from one can). In place of milk I used unsweetened almond milk. If you can’t tolerate nuts then you could probably just measure out the proper amount of liquid leftover in the coconut milk can (the thin stuff). The coconut really is a nice touch with the pumpkin.

I had a good amount of filling leftover and I’m planning to make that into mini crustless pumpkin pies.

Before adding the filling, I blind baked my einkorn pie crust. I lined it with parchment paper and filled it with dried beans, then baked it at 375F for about 10 minutes and for an additional 5 minutes after removing the paper and beans. I then added my filling and baked according to Sally’s instructions. Mine only took about 45 minutes (I shielded the crust with foil after about 25 minutes).

The Decorations

As I said, I followed Sally’s sugared cranberry directions to make those. However, for the dough cutouts I took that second half of einkorn pie dough, rolled it out, and used my vintage style pie dough cutters to make leaves and turkeys. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like my cutters are readily available anymore. I did find a set here if you’re interested. Otherwise you could use the leaf and turkey from something like these or leaves and acorns from these. Then I baked them on a parchment lined baking sheet at 350F for about 10 minutes. You could brush them with an egg wash prior to baking if you’d like them to be a little more brown (I didn’t).

Let your pie cool completely (several hours), then decorate! I decided to go all the way around the edge of the pie, alternating leaves and turkeys, then added a little embellishment in the middle and scattered some cranberries!

I know this post wasn’t an “original recipe” or anything, but sometimes it’s helpful just to brainstorm together to find workarounds for our individual needs and maybe get a little inspiration for decorating!

If you’re celebrating Thanksgiving soon, I wish a very Happy Thanksgiving to you and your loved ones!

Blessings,
Melissa

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