The pumpkin spice season really hit hard this year. Food corporations, quick to capitalize on an easy bit of marketing, rushed pumpkin spice everything to the shelves. To such an extent that one Slate correspondent was able to spend an entire week eating nothing but pumpkin spice flavored foods.
To end a common misperception, something labeled "pumpkin spice" does not have any pumpkin flavoring in it. What would that flavoring even be? Have you ever eaten unspiced, unsweetened pumpkin puree? It tastes like squash. (No surprise, because that is what it is. Squash.) So please, I beg of you, stop adding a spoonful of pumpkin puree to your homemade pumpkin spice lattes. It's just gross.
It is the way of life in the year 2013 that if people like something (like the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte), every other company will market a crazy artificially flavored version of that thing, with a whole lot of sugar. (See also: pomegranate flavored things, blueberry flavored things, pesto flavored things… the list goes on.)
Pumpkin spice is mainly cinnamon, with a dash of ginger, allspice, cloves, and nutmeg. It's easy enough to reproduce at home - you can buy little jars of the stuff on the spice aisle - but pumpkin spice flavored things also have a whole lot of sugar. (Except that it's rarely actual sugar. Mainly high fructose corn syrup.)
What the Slate correspondent concluded was that artificial pumpkin spice foods are gross, and you get tired of them pretty quickly. But the actual spice mixture is surprisingly versatile, and works well in a lot of savory foods. He used it as a rub for roasted pork loin, added it to Spanish pumpkin soup, as the spice base for an improvised curry mixture, and even as a seasoning for fish tacos, which he reported was surprisingly delicious.
Image courtesy Flickr/Scorpions and Centaurs
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