The spices of fall are all about the pumpkin. With the big, orange gourds so abundant and cheap this time of year, it’s easy to make your own spice mix for pumpkin pie and other pumpkin recipes.
The most essential ingredients in pumpkin spice seasoning are ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg. Other recipes may include allspice, cloves and mace.**
If you’re not a fan of spicy food, cut back on the cayenne or omit it altogether.**
Also, keep in mind that these recipes call for whole spices, not ground. If a recipe calls for one teaspoon of ground cinnamon, you’ll need five sticks of cinnamon to equal that amount.
When you’re ready to start mixing up your own recipe, scroll down to see five different recipes for pumpkin spice seasoning.**
There are dozens of online recipes for homemade pumpkin spice seasoning, and none of them are the same. The differences are not just in the ingredients – what you use to replace the individual spices – but also in how much to use, whether or not to heat it up, even what kind of cinnamon to buy.
Thing is, I don’t ever remember buying pumpkin spice seasoning from the store. I have no idea why there is a store-bought version. Do people not have pumpkins in their pantries? But if we’re going to build a recipe for it, we need to understand the original first.
This isn’t a new challenge; there are countless cookbooks devoted to recreating the flavor profiles of popular commercial products (mostly baked goods). Most of them give exact ingredient amounts and instructions on how much to use. These recipes are important starting points; they’re how we figure out how much cinnamon and what type of nutmeg go into the mix. But ultimately, this is a matter of personal taste; there’s no “right” amount of nutmeg that will make it taste exactly like the pre-mixed stuff.
*Note: If you are looking for a recipe to make pumpkin spice seasoning, we have a great one here.
Where’s the pumpkin?
Pumpkin pie spice is delicious, but it has nothing to do with pumpkins. In fact, the only place you’ll find real pumpkins in this recipe is in the “spice” part of it. The word comes from the French pompekin, which means pear. The pumpkin part is all about flavor, not about color or texture.
The basic recipe for making pumpkin pie spice seasoning is simple: take equal parts of cinnamon, ginger, cloves and nutmeg (or mace), and add them to 2 teaspoons of powdered sugar. Then sift them together or put them through a blender.
We like to use organic spices because they are better tasting and better smelling than synthetics. But if you want to go all out, buy your pumpkin spice ingredients fresh instead of buying them at the store. Spices lose their potency over time, and many people think that spices bought at grocery stores are old by the time they’re bought by consumers. If you’re buying them whole, buy in small quantities and replace them often.
For those who don’t have time for that kind of thing,
I love pumpkin pie spice season. It’s the time of year when everyone makes pumpkin pie, and you can find pumpkin pie spice at the grocery store. I like to make my own pumpkin spice seasoning mix, because I can control the ingredients and know what’s in it.
This is a collection of recipes for homemade pumpkin pie spice seasoning mixes and other recipes that use pumpkin pie spice.
I love pumpkin pie. I make it every year. But after a while, the same old recipe gets boring. So I decided to experiment with my own pumpkin spice recipe so that when I’m slammed with work, I don’t have to resort to stopping by the store on my way home from work and grabbing one of the premade mixes.
Pumpkin spice is a pre-made spice mix that includes allspice, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and clove.
Often sold in jars at grocery stores during the fall months, pumpkin pie spice can be used to flavor a variety of dishes, including cookies, breads, muffins, pancakes and more. It can also be used as a nice addition to coffee and tea.
Toss it into pancake batter or add it to a sugar and cream mixture for homemade whipped cream. Pumpkin spice can also be used for other desserts such as cakes and pies or paired with white chocolate for a tasty dip.
Use pumpkin pie spice in place of vanilla extract or cinnamon when making baked goods at home. Simply place the amount of mixture needed in the recipe into the batter.
Pumpkin spice is an example of a branded mix. The mix is not some sort of natural flavor that one obtains from mixing actual pumpkins with spices. It’s a blend of artificial flavors mixed by a flavor company.
Taken together, the artificial ingredients in pumpkin spice are all chemicals, and they’re not doing anything you couldn’t do better with real pumpkin and real spices. But they are doing much more than you could do with either alone. They are creating a specific taste sensation that jingles your pleasure sensors just so, while leaving your intellect unmoved.
The reason the pumpkin spice combination is so effective as a marketing tool is that it has nothing to do with specific tastes but rather moods and memories. The combination of flavors doesn’t make you think about pumpkins or about anything else in particular; it makes you think about comfort food and family gatherings and other pleasant associations that have to do with eating pies at Thanksgiving or Christmas. For this reason, many people who don’t actually like the taste will buy it anyway, just because it reminds them of happy times.
This is what I mean when I say that people don’t buy products, they buy brands: combinations of feelings and associations that have been tested by research to produce the desired response
