Pumpkin Pie Rum

What is fall without a drink inspired by holidays?
Inspired by my wife's love of all things pumpkin and the barrage of Thanksgiving advertising, I decided to infuse some pumpkin pie rum.

Since I've never actually made pumpkin pie, or infused anything this complicated, I took to the interwebs to follow in someone else's footsteps.

That someone was Claire Bertin-Lang, who posted a receipe to The LEVO League, a site for professional women. Not only do I follow her recipe without any alteration, but she also has some tasty drink recipes so you may want to click through the linky-link and read it straight from the source. About all I've done is added some pictures of the step-by-step and changed the flavor text.

The first thing you need to do is gather your ingredients (and your tools). It will be very similar to making a pumpkin pie from scratch, or so I've been told.

Ingredients:
• 1 medium sugar or pie pumpkin (don't grab a decorative one, you'll be disappointed)
• 1 tablespoon cinnamon
• 1 tablespoon nutmeg
• 1 tablespoon cloves
• 1 tablespoon allspice
• Pinch sea salt
• Ground black pepper (I used 3 turns of the old grinder)
• Vegetable oil 
• 750ml Rum (something light and as flavorless as possible, I use Bacardi Silver)

Tools:
• Sharp Knife
• Cutting board
• Grapefruit spoon (not needed, but helps)
• Mortar and pestle (or a small bowl)
• Oven
• Cookie Sheet
• Cooking Brush
• Coffee filters
• Funnel

Directions:

Holy crap! Pumpkins are pretty gross inside

De-goop the pumpkin. This will involve cutting it in half, scooping out the insides, and either pitching them or setting them aside. I found a grapefruit spoon is perfect for this. This being the scooping. Use a knife for the cutting.

Grapefruit Spoon = Teaspoon with teeth. Nom-nom-nom

Pre-heat your oven to 450°F. Depending on your local weather, this will either pleasantly warm up the house or make it unbearably stuffy.

Using that knife from step 1, cut the pumpkin into crescent shaped slices about an inch thick.

Little tasty moons

In your bowl / mortar, mix up all of the spice ingredients (everything but the pumpkin and the rum).

Lay out your pumpkin slices on the cookie sheet, making sure they don't overlap. I covered my cookie sheet in foil to make clean up easier. Brush a light coating of oil and sprinkle your spice mix on both sides of the pumpkin crescents, then put the cookie sheet in the oven.

Your house will smell delicious. This may infuriate people living with you when they find out they can't eat it. 

Cook the slices for 20 minutes, flip them over, and cook for another 15 minutes. They should still be a bit firm once they're done. Make sure you don't over cook them or else you'll be trying to filter pumpkin mush out of your rum. Filtering is difficult enough for this recipe. 

Science! or something

Let the slices cool completely. This generally takes about 30 minutes (or less). Once cooled, line the mason jars with the spiced baked pumpkin slices.  Claire's recipe indicates that you should only use one jars worth, but I've found this leaves me with both an excess of pumpkin and an excess of rum, so I stretch it out to two. Having that bit of extra will come in handy, as long as you know one or two people that likes pumpkin.  

Oh, and keep the bottle. You'll need it later.

Now we play the waiting game.

... 

[Two weeks later (or so)]

Now it's time to filter out all the oil and bits of pumpkin and get some rum you can drink. Because this particular infusion has so much spice and oil, I found it works best to double filter. 

Using cheesecloth (if you're fancy) or coffee filters (if you're like me) and a funnel, I pour the rum into another set of mason jars, and then grab a fresh set of filters and pour it into the bottle. 

If you're short on jars (or really want to be thorough) you can pour from the jar into the bottle, clean the jar, change your filter, pour the infusion back into the jar, clean the bottle, change the filter, and then pour back into the bottle.

Either way, you're now the proud owner of a fifth of pumpkin pie rum. 

Enjoy! 

Be prepared, it goes fast.