As Halloween nears, pumpkins begin to appear on stoops and window sills all over Madtown. But in the rush to clean, carve and display these ghoulish orange globes, we often forget about their non-decorating benefit – namely, food!
Really? Pumpkin? Look around you, Madison! It may seem like an obscure flavor, but you’ll find there’s more of it out there than you think – especially this time of year. Lattes, beers, ice cream, pastries, pies … many restaurants and stores have taken pumpkin’s unique flavor and applied it to a wide variety of dishes.
Take The Chocolate Shoppe (468 State St.), for example. Its Snap-O-Lantern flavor, which only appears in autumn, is a mixture of pumpkin pie ice cream and crumbled-up ginger snaps.
“The ginger snaps are the best part,” Stacy Harnett, a Madison native, said. Being soaked in ice cream renders the ginger snaps pleasantly mashy, and their holiday spice flavor sits nicely upon the clean backdrop of creamy, rich pumpkin pie pie flavor.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Archer Farms Pumpkin Pie yogurt (available at Target). The pumpkin pie flavor comes through all right, but the bitterness of nutmeg, ginger and cinnamon (usually offset by sugar in real pumpkin pie) does not mesh well with the artificial sucralose Target uses in its fat free yogurts. Moreover, the brown specks meant to imitate these spices render an otherwise tolerable texture slightly pasty.
If you’re looking for a more healthy pumpkin fix, Red Mango (627 State St.) offers a better way with its Pumpkin Spice frozen yogurt. The yogurt itself is a tinge sour, but the pumpkin and ginger flavors come through all right. The texture is not as silky or mouth-filling as ice cream, but the blocky-creaminess of frozen yogurt is an adequate stand-in and is much preferable to Target’s pasty stuff. Plus, you can get any number of toppings ranging from Kit Kat bars to M&Ms to graham crackers. I went with the graham crackers to simulate a graham cracker crust – not bad!
In the cake department, you can always head to Madison Sweets (511 State St.) for a Pumpkin Spice cupcake. Beware, though – the lil’ cuppin cake may look cute with it’s perfectly round dollop of cream cheese frosting and speckling of cinnamon, but the texture doesn’t quite live up.
“It’s more like a bread,” UW student Lindsay Wesolowski said. “If I was in the mood for a cupcake, I would be disappointed.” Although the cream cheese frosting is light and pillowy, the “cake” part of the cupcake is heavy and dense like pumpkin bread instead of the moist airiness of cake.
A better way to experience home-baked pumpkin flavor comes from the front door display at Fresh Madison Market (703 University Ave.) stacked with Father’s Table Pumpkin Rolls – pumpkin cake rolled around butter cream frosting. The cake itself resonates strongly of cinnamon, ginger and powdered sugar, and the butter cream frosting is so good it’ll make you wonder why no one every paired butter cream frosting with pumpkin pie before. Plus, you can feel good about yourself since 50 percent of Father’s Table profits go to charity.
A pumpkin spice latte from Peet’s Coffee & Tea (in Memorial Union) is another way to get your pumpkin on. With frothy steamed milk at the forefront, the pumpkin pie flavor takes on more of an understated role – almost too understated. This drink could have used a little extra ginger or cinnamon to cut through the milk’s headiness.
If you really want a good pumpkin flavor out of your drink, I highly recommend Pumpkin Disorderly Ale from The Vintage (529 University Ave.). The beer’s naturally sharp flavor conveys hints of cinnamon, cloves and ginger like a dream, mellowed out by a warm, pumpkin-ey, slightly sweet body. Who needs real pie when you have this stuff? Just grab some whipped cream, some friends and a heated outdoor table, and you’re all set.
As Madison local Suzanne Liebergen said, “It brings fall closer to my heart.”
Well, maybe not. For most, guzzling a beer that evokes the feeling of pumpkin pie just doesn’t cut it. After all these teasers, you might want the real thing.
Fortunately, the cute, brunch-based Sunroom Cafe (638 State St.) bakes any kind of pie to order. Upon bringing the pie home and tasting it, I found a few counts against it. First, it was refrigerator-cold when I got it – evidence that it hadn’t been baked fresh. In addition, the pie’s weight made it lean outwards in its flimsy tin, causing the edges to pull away from the center and this weird little crack to appear all the way around it. Finally, the crust was thin and tough on the bottom and dry-tasting on the outside – not ideal. The center “pumpkin meat,” however, was creamy, not too sweet, and it evoked that subtle flavor of pumpkin and spice for which pumpkin pie is famous. It saved the pie from being a complete disaster.
Still, if you really have a pumpkin pie craving, I would recommend you skip the $15 Sunroom “gourmet” option and pick up a Sara Lee from Fresh Market. Or better yet – make one yourself!
Samantha Stepp is a junior majoring in journalism. Email suggestions, recipes or comments to [email protected].
