Vegan Pumpkin & Sausage Flan, great hot or cold!

I have had such a lot of fun in the kitchen using pumpkin for so many different recipes and this Vegan Pumpkin & Sausage Flan has been no exception to that fun!

However, this is my last pumpkin recipe for a while as I need to feed my husband something other than pumpkin now! ????

This is a great dish that will easily feed 8 if you use more sausages, and it tastes just as good cold as it does hot!

Being a fan of a little spice in my life, I have added chilli flakes to the pumpkin filling. But this is down to personal choice and you can either leave them out or put in less.

In addition, you will need 1 quantity of my vegan cashew white sauce and 1 quantity of my vegan wholemeal shortcrust dough. Neither of these is included in the time for this recipe but can easily be made ahead of time or the day before.

I have made this great Vegan Pumpkin & Sausage Flan with different sausages such as Linda McCartney’s and Morrisons Taste Vegan Sausages. Both of these, if I haven’t got time to make my own, are favourites of mine.

But this time I decided to try Tesco’s Plant Chef Caramelised Onion Meat-Free Bangers. I have to say, they are very tasty but I wasn’t overly impressed by the skins on them. In this dish, they didn’t brown as much as I would have liked them to.

Thus, when I make this dish again, I will go back to Linda McCartney’s or Morrisson’s as they do not have a skin on and brown very well.

Also note that as Linda McCartney’s sausage are not that thick, there is no need to defrost them first. They still cook from frozen in the time the flan is in the oven.

But the star of the show here is the pumpkin and carrot filling. Mixed with my vegan cashew white sauce, you get a great flavour and texture. This flavour and texture go perfectly with the pastry. So you could even make this without adding sausages.

Although there are a few more elements to this recipe, it really is very easy and definitely worth a little extra effort.

Making the filling

Start by melting the butter in a large pan with a lid, and cook the pumpkin and carrot until starting to soften. A lidded pan will help keep the moisture and flavours in the pan, which all adds to the taste of the final dish.

Next, add the paprika and chilli flakes (if using) and season well with salt and pepper. Keep covered and cook for a further 2 minutes.

Then remove from the heat and stir in the quantity of vegan cashew white sauce and set aside.

Making the pastry case for the Vegan Pumpkin & Sausage Flan

First, preheat the oven as per recipe directions and, taking the quantity of vegan wholemeal shortcrust dough, line a flan dish. There is no need to grease the flan dish.

There is enough pastry dough to cover a 23-25cm / 9-10 inch flan dish.

Sometimes I just want to keep ‘washing-up’ to a minimum and just use a spoon and my ‘thumbs’ when lining a flan dish. And because the dough is cold from the fridge, it’s easy to work without actually rolling it with a rolling pin.

Just use the back of a spoon to spread the dough.

And then use your thumbs to work into the edges and up the sides.

This is a really quick and easy method and really cuts down on cleaning-up and washing-up!

Then place some kitchen foil and baking beads on the lined flan dish and bake for 10 minutes. Remove the beads and foil and bake for a further 10 minutes.

This method is called ‘blind baking’. It is necessary when the pastry is going to take longer than the filling to cook. Also, if you are filling an un-cooked dough, it can make the dough wetter and will prevent it from cooking. It will also depend on the thickness of your dough. This flan has a thick dough crust, thus is necessary to ‘blind bake’ before putting in the filling.

But there are times when this is not necessary like when making pies and thinner pastries.

If you haven’t got any baking beads just prick the dough a few times and ‘scrunch’ some foil up and place on top. This is what I used to do before I had baking beads.

It works ok. But if you are likely to do a lot of pastry dough baking, I strongly recommend you invest in some baking beads. They will last for years!

With Christmas coming up, why not add them to your Christmas wish-list?

Putting it all together

If the sausages you are using are quite chunky, you might like to pre-cook them a little. That’s what I did with this particular brand. I just gently fried them for a couple of minutes on each side.

However, as I mentioned earlier, this is not always necessary and you will need to decide depending on which sausages you use.

Once you have ‘blind-baked’ the pastry dough, you can fill it with the pumpkin and carrot mixture and place the sausage on top.

Then bake in the oven for 25-30 minutes. This will allow the pastry to finish cooking, the sausages to cook through and the pumpkin and carrot filling to heat back up to temperature.

This dish has carbs, protein, and vegetables in it. Therefore, I just like to serve a slice with lightly steamed broccoli. ???? Delicious!

When cold, I actually serve it with salad. ????

Please let me know in the comments below what you served yours with?

Happy Flan making and ENJOY! ????