Libby's® Famous Pumpkin Pie Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Is it better to use condensed milk or evaporated milk in pumpkin pie? ›

As the name suggests, sweetened condensed milk makes the pie sweeter and gives it a denser, creamier texture. Evaporated milk, on the other hand, yields a lighter, airier result. Evaporated milk isn't sweetened either, which is why you can't simply swap one thickener for the other.

Pumpkin: Of course, you'll need a can of Libby's pure pumpkin. Evaporated milk: A can of evaporated milk lends richness and helps thicken the pie filling.

In this taste test, our Test Kitchen pros found that the biggest name in the pumpkin game does, in fact, make the best canned pumpkin on the market. Libby's 100% Pure Pumpkin is a favorite among our culinary crew.

Too many pumpkin pies have soggy crusts that never fully brown. To avoid this, recipes often call for blind baking your crust. That is, baking the empty crust before the filling is added. This gives the crust time to firm up and brown, time it typically doesn't get if the faster cooking filling is added first.

Pies with too much evaporated milk formed blisters on top.

Though the interior of the filling had a great, creamy texture. The flavor was ever-so-slightly muted and had a hint of milkiness to it.

Don't Substitute One for the Other

Thus, using condensed milk in a recipe that requires evaporated milk will yield an overly sweet dish.

Libby's Easy Pumpkin Pie Mix

It's very creamy and very flavorful, very cinnamon forward and sweet, but I think once you mix it with the other ingredients and bake it, that added spice will serve you well. This is the best canned pumpkin pie filling if you're lazy and just want to dump!

Evaporated milk is usually used in a pumpkin pie recipe because evaporated milk has 60% of the water removed which helps to create a thick, creamy texture without adding extra sweetness.

Pumpkin pie mix can be used as a substitute for pure canned pumpkin in some recipes. However, since it is already sweetened and flavored, you'll need to make some adjustments. In most dessert recipes, leave out the pumpkin pie spice and cut down on the sugar since the pumpkin pie mix includes it.

According to David and Susan, Costco uses one kind of pumpkin exclusively: Dickinson pumpkins. Dickinson pumpkins are not the orange jack-o'-lantern canvas you're picturing; rather, they're beige with smooth sides.

Is Libby pumpkin real pumpkin? ›

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.

The Best Overall: Libby's 100% Pure Canned Pumpkin

The 100+ year old company bought the rights to grow a special kind of Dickinson pumpkin for their brand, and that is one of the key reasons their canned pumpkin is so reliable and consistent year after year.

Often, blind-baking solves this problem. If you're making a single crust custard-filled pie, like a pumpkin pie, bake the pie dough first before adding filling to allow some of the moisture in the crust to evaporate. You can also totally blind-bake fruit pies.

But don't dock it (docking is aerating the crust before baking by poking it with the tines of a fork). This will cause the custard to seep out into the bottom crust, defeating that whole "flaky" thing you were going for. The test kitchen's vessel of choice for pie is a 9" glass Pyrex pan.

With a custard pie, like a pumpkin pie, the moisture in the filling can make the crust soggy before it has time to actually bake. Blind baking the crust until it's half-baked helps the crust stay firm.

For the most part, if you find yourself without condensed milk on hand, you can substitute an equal amount of evaporated milk. The consistency will be the same, but since evaporated milk is unsweetened, you'll need to add sweetener to match the recipe's intended flavor profile or to suit your personal preference.

Condensed milk has had a large amount of its water removed and sugar added which leaves it much thicker and sweeter. Evaporated milk is simply heated until it boils and then is immediately turned off. This doesn't really change the milk much but it sterilises it. They are not interchangeable in recipes.

In summary, evaporated milk is unsweetened and has a similar nutritional value to regular milk, while sweetened condensed milk is very sweet and has a higher calorie count due to the added sugar.