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Melissa Clark has spent months perfecting techniques, so you don’t have to. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. For the best pies, skip the actual pumpkin, increase the pecans, and precook your apples. Ryan Liebe for The New York Times. Pie had been a constant on Thanksgiving tables even before Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the day a national holiday in 1863.
Pumpkin was the first variety to be associated with the feast, soon joined by other seasonal favorites like apple and pecan. The three work perfectly together — creamy, smooth pumpkin, juicy apple and crunchy, candylike pecan — each adding a distinct allure. I’ve spent every Thanksgiving of my baking lifetime striving to perfect recipes for these three quintessential pies. There were some tweaks that stuck, like precooking the Ginger Golds for my apple pie and substituting a mix of maple syrup and honey for the corn syrup in pecan pie. While I’m still devoted to all-butter dough, I no longer bother parbaking. I’ve learned that a metal pie pan placed on a hot sheet pan conducts the heat well enough to create a shatteringly crisp, golden-brown crust without having to break out the foil and dried beans. This doesn’t work with glass or ceramic pie plates, which aren’t as good at conducting heat as metal.
The results of all this testing are three brand-new but still perfectly classic Thanksgiving pie recipes that are the absolute best of their kind. At least until I start tweaking next year. Homemade puréed winter squash is delicious in pie, and a whole lot better than anything in a can. Have you ever gone to the trouble of slicing, seeding, peeling, cooking and puréeing the flesh of a big orange pumpkin to make a pie — only to conclude that, after all that work, it’s not as good as if you’d used the pulp from the can? Though the designation may be misleading, it’s perfectly legal.
Dickinson variety tastes like a cross between a butternut squash and kabocha. But homemade puréed winter squash is delicious, and a whole lot better than anything in a can — sweeter, brighter and fresher. It’s also a snap to make, especially if you buy a container of peeled, cubed butternut squash. To get the most flavor, I roast my squash cubes rather than steam or boil them. In the oven’s high heat, the cubes condense and turn golden, and caramelize at their edges. A sprinkling of sugar and a drizzle of heavy cream aids the cause. Puréed with more heavy cream, eggs and spices, roasted butternut squash makes for the best pumpkin pie you’ve ever had, no pumpkins required.
Precooking the apple slices helps stabilize them, so they don’t dissolve into a saucy heap. Although it’s doubtful that apple pie was served at the first Thanksgiving feast, the tradition of apple pie baking was brought to America with the colonists, who planted apple trees when they arrived. The earliest apple pie recipes were similar to what we still make today — sugared, seasoned apples baked in a crust. This divide, between cooking the apples before baking and piling raw slices into a crust, was what I focused on when creating my best apple pie recipe.
Most apple pie recipes in the United States today call for raw sliced apples. But once I started precooking, I became a convert, for two reasons. Raw apples release their liquid into the pie crust as they bake, which steams and pools, making it harder to get a crisp crust, no matter how many vents you cut into the top or how much thickener you add. Raw apple slices also collapse as they bake, creating a gap between the sunken filling and the mounded top of the crust. You end up with glossy, perfectly cooked apples sandwiched in a crunchy, buttery crust. To get a supple and consistent texture in the filling, use only one kind of apple.