Vegan Pumpkin Cheesecake

If you're raising your eyebrows right now thinking "Since when do vegetables end up in cheesecakes?". Let's first clarify what pumpkins are in the first place. Strictly speaking, pumpkins aren't vegetables at all. Ha! But they aren’t fruit either ! Huh? They are actually classified as "fruits" and, due to their vegetable-like properties, as "fruiting vegetables." Ahhh! If one wants to take it entirely exact, pumpkins are even berries. (Source) Yikes! So you can relax your eyebrows again because there’s no need to become unsettled about fruits or rather berries ending up in our cheesecake, is there?

But of course, we understand that it's not common to use pumpkins in sweet dishes. However, the combination of sweet ingredients and the savory taste of pumpkins goes pretty well together, which is why we've already introduced you to pumpkin buns, pumpkin brownies, and even pumpkin pancakes. So a pumpkin cheesecake was definitely missing from our list.

For our recipe, we used nutmeg pumpkin, which has a very spicy taste and reminds us of nutmeg. In contrast to our sweet and tart cheesecake, it fits perfectly and is very easy to work with. You can keep your eyes open at the market for green-beige to dull-yellow pumpkins with a heavily ribbed shape. Muscat pumpkins, just like the butternut squash, belong to the musk pumpkins. Of course, this name doesn't come from anywhere because nutmeg pumpkins can weigh up to 35 kg. Wow! However, we only need about 350 g for our pie, so feel free to grab a small one. In the supermarket, most nutmeg pumpkins weigh about 3-5 kg, but you can also find them cut into pieces, which is super convenient.

For our recipe, we remove the peel before cooking, as we only want the soft flesh for the pumpkin filling, which is deliciously creamy with our vegan curd. You can eat the peel , but it takes much longer to cook or bake than the flesh and is, therefore, often still too hard. (Source) By the way, you can even eat nutmeg squash raw! So if you have some leftovers, it's great to use in salads or cook it up in soups, jams, chutneys, casseroles, or stews (Source). If you can’t find a nutmeg pumpkin, you can also use a hokkaido pumpkin. It tastes slightly more neutral than nutmeg squash, so feel free to add some nutmeg and more Pumpkin Pie Spice in this case. Let’s cook some vegetable, er, fruit, er, and pumpkin pie!