TOP: Sparrow Bakery is making at least 250 of its traditional pumpkin pies this Thanksgiving. ABOVE: Chopped up pieces of pumpkin are pulled out of the oven after being roasted for pumpkin pie filling at Sparrow Bakery. BELOW: Sisters Bakery’s pumpkin pies are made from scratch.(Andy Tullis/Bulletin photos; Submitted photo)

Glowing ovens line the walls inside the original Sparrow Bakery kitchen. Huge bags of flour and brown sugar sit on the floor. The pastry chef cuts a butter pat off a 32-pound slab and slips it into a bowl. A nearby bakery employee rolls out a pie crust, then trims and flutes it around the edges of a metal dish.

Sparrow started preparing for the holiday pie rush weeks ago.

For a month before Thanksgiving, area bakers spend long days in the kitchen preparing pies for locals to take home for the annual feast.

“We’ve been doing this for 11 years, and I think for some families it’s part of their tradition at this point,” said Amy Brewster, Sparrow Bakery’s head fine pastry chef.

Sisters Bakery and Sparrow are making traditional pumpkin pies. Along with the turkey, the custard pie has become a symbol of the traditional Thanksgiving meal.

“It’s like you eat everything so you can get to that point and have that piece of pie,” said Andrew Bourgerie, co-owner of Sisters Bakery.

So, what’s the real difference between a Libby’s canned pumpkin pie and one from a local bakery?

The pumpkin.

Slice of history

Pumpkin was a plentiful crop in New America and traditionally served as a kind of porridge, according to Laura Hagen, a chef instructor at Central Oregon Community College’s Cascade Culinary Institute.

Pumpkin was a major form of nutrition for many Native Americans at the time and considered a staple, in part because of its preservation quality.

Because of its abundance, it was considered a low-class food by the colonists at first.

“They didn’t want to serve it at a dinner party because it symbolized agrarian culture and the farmer, which is why I think it’s so popular now,” Hagen said.

“Because at Thanksgiving, we try to connect with that; we try to connect with the natural world.”

In 1796, the first American cookbook, “American Cookery” by Amelia Simmons, was published, and it introduced new ways to prepare pumpkin as a sweet.

“It took several hundred years before they figured out that it made a pretty good dessert,” Hagen said.

Not-so-pumpkin pie

The trick to making a delicious pie is to make the dough and the filling from scratch.

Pastry chefs recommend pureeing fresh pumpkin rather than using a canned pumpkin filling to keep the freshness. “The brightness of flavor is a noticeable difference” said Hagen. “Also, the pastry chef can really create their own mixture of flavor and spice.”

“I think some people have negative connotations with pumpkin; they just think of canned pumpkin pie. Maybe you haven’t tried something as special as ours that’s putting a lot of care into it,” Brewster said.

Two pallets filled with Long Island cheese pumpkins from Sauvie Island were delivered to Sparrow Bakery this fall to be roasted and used to make pumpkin pie filling.

Despite what many assume, the pumpkins used for pumpkin pie are not the traditional jack-o-lantern pumpkins. Those “don’t have the sugar content in the squash that you would need,” said Stephanie Bourgerie, co-owner of Sisters Bakery.

Businesses use different varieties of pumpkin and squash depending on the desired texture and flavor. Sisters Bakery is using sugar pie pumpkins this year.

The well-known Libby’s canned pumpkin puree is made from Dickinson pumpkins, a small, pale orange pumpkin grown in Peoria, Illinois.

Sparrow pie

At least 250 pumpkin pies will be made at Sparrow Bakery for Thanksgiving this year.

The bakery’s employees began chopping and roasting pumpkins in early November. The pumpkins are roasted for about 45 minutes to an hour and then pureed and frozen until the week of Thanksgiving. A few days before, the baking team makes the dough, defrosts the puree, adds spices, sugars and other ingredients and bakes the final product.

“When you’re building it up, it’s a pretty delicious pie,” Brewster said. “Ours is also a spicy pie, so there’s a lot of flavor packed into it.”

A Sisters Thanksgiving

Every year, Bourgerie is in charge of the pies for her family’s Thanksgiving, an appropriate task for the co-owner of a bakery. The Bourgeries, including Stephanie Bourgerie’s son, Andrew, and daughter-in-law, Michaela, bought the Sisters Bakery in March. Since then, the family of four have been serving up freshly baked breads, pastries, cakes and pies. On average, the bakery sold about 50 pies each day during the summer.

The Bourgeries usually have a variety of pies on their Thanksgiving table, but “definitely always pumpkin and definitely always a pecan,” Stephanie Bourgerie said. “Being that our family isn’t from Oregon, we’re doing marionberry pies this year to get them hooked on that wonderful fruit.”

In addition to making pies for their own Thanksgiving meal, they’ll be baking pumpkin pies for bakery customers. “I think it’s a good balance between the spice, the sweetness and the actual pumpkin taste,” she said.

The pumpkin pies are made from scratch with sugar pumpkin pie filling.

“What we do is boil it down until it’s soft and then, therefore, you’re not incorporating any of the flavors to it so we can add what we want to it,” Andrew Bourgerie said. When it’s roasted, “that’s when you get that squash taste. We don’t necessarily want that — we want it to be pretty plain Jane.” Thus, the bakers can add the appropriate amounts of sugar, spices and cream to reach the desired flavor.

Being a family business, Thanksgiving is a special holiday for the Sisters Bakery team. They want to share a part of their family with the community through their pies.

“There’s nothing better than the most beautiful pie coming out of the oven and you’re like, ‘I made that,” Michaela Bourgerie said. “It warms your heart when you can make something rustic and beautiful and enjoy it.”

— Reporter: mcrowe@bendbulletin.com, 541-383-0351

“There’s nothing better than the most beautiful pie coming out of the oven and you’re like, ‘I made that.’ It warms your heart when you can make something rustic and beautiful and enjoy it.” — Sisters Bakery co-owner Michaela Bourgerie