America’s Most Overrated Baking Challenge
Pumpkin pie carries a ceremonial weight at the Thanksgiving table that few other dishes can match. Home bakers often approach it like a project: clear the afternoon, gather the ingredients, brace for complexity. The cultural gravity is real. The actual cooking? Much less so.
A YouTube channel called You Suck at Cooking has been making exactly that argument since 2015. The format is deliberately lo-fi: a first-person perspective, grainy footage, shaky camera work, absurdist humor throughout. Episode 68, uploaded on November 15, 2017, takes on pumpkin pie. A brief post on Neatorama picked it up two days later and called it what it is: a genuinely useful cooking video that delivers its usefulness mostly through comedy.
Why Does a Simple Pie Feel So Scary?
Thanksgiving inflates stakes. When the audience is extended family and the meal carries decades of expectation, the cost of a failed dish feels much higher than it would on an ordinary Tuesday. Pumpkin pie absorbed that pressure early. By 1827, novelist Sarah Josepha Hale was describing it as occupying “the most distinguished niche” on the Thanksgiving table, a considerable reputation for a spiced custard in a pastry shell. After Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, the pie became close to obligatory, deepening the sense that getting it right truly mattered. None of that history makes it harder to bake. The difficulty is borrowed from the occasion, not the dish.
The Raw Pumpkin Detour Nobody Needed
The most instructive moment in the episode involves the narrator working with a whole, raw pumpkin, framed as “catching a wild pumpkin.” What follows is an extended portrait of unnecessary effort: cutting, scooping, roasting, and pureeing a fresh gourd when canned puree would accomplish the same thing. Pumpkin pie filling is a spiced custard, pumpkin, eggs, evaporated milk, and sugar, baked in a single shell with no top crust. In a filling this heavily spiced, the difference between fresh-roasted pumpkin and good canned puree is, at best, subtle. The Neatorama editor put it plainly: cooking a whole pumpkin from scratch is “not worth the effort.”
Canned pumpkin has been woven into the pie’s history for nearly a century. In 1929, Libby’s introduced a canned pumpkin line that became a Thanksgiving fixture; the company now processes close to 50,000 tonnes of pumpkin per year. The can label typically carries a recipe, which is precisely where the video is nudging you, through whatever comedic detours it takes to get there.
Pumpkin Pie Spice and the Art of Fake Complexity
The episode regards pre-blended pumpkin pie spice with cheerful disrespect. Pumpkin pie spice combines cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice, all standard pantry items. The blend packages them for convenience, which sounds sensible until you consider that the pie is already one of the more convenient things you can bake. Using the blend is not a mistake; the spices inside it are the right ones. The issue is cultural: pumpkin pie spice is sold with a subtle air of specialized knowledge, as if this combination of five everyday spices is too intricate to assemble yourself. It is not. It is a convenience product for a recipe that was already convenient, sold to an audience told the recipe is complicated.
Sorting the Joke Tips from the Real Ones
Not everything in the video is meant to be applied in a real kitchen. The “recycled crust” segment is genuinely ambiguous, and the video ends with a short song. This is not a culinary school tutorial. What is striking is that the mixed format works. The Neatorama post noted on November 17, 2017 that viewers must sort legitimate tips from deliberate nonsense on their own, which works because pumpkin pie is legible enough for most people to manage. You do not need formal training to recognize that “catch a wild pumpkin” is a joke and “follow the instructions on the can” is not.
You Suck at Cooking has built over 3.68 million subscribers and more than 736 million total views by wrapping useful information inside absurdist comedy and trusting audiences to extract what they need. Strip the comedy away and the core message is plain: the most demanding part of making a pumpkin pie is probably deciding to make one. The result has held its place at the table since at least 1796, when Amelia Simmons included two pumpkin pie recipes in the first cookbook published in the United States.