Martha Stewart tells us how she really feels about pumpkin spice
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
It looks like Al Roker has a lifestyle icon in his pumpkin spice-less corner.
On Nov. 6, the queen of Thanksgiving herself, Martha Stewart, stopped by TODAY to talk about her picturesque farm in Bedford, New York, how she doesn’t think about “dressing her age” and two autumn juggernauts: turkey and pumpkin spice.
“What is it about Thanksgiving that you love so much?” Craig Melvin asked Stewart.
“Well, I love holidays, you know that, and Thanksgiving is one of my favorites,” Stewart said, doubling down on her stance that Mariah Carey and the day-after-Halloween-means-Christmastime crowd should pump the brakes and feast on some turkey and stuffing first. “I do have gobblers in the poultry yard. I have 17 of them right now.”
“Soon to be 16,” Al joked to Stewart.
“Soon to be about 13,” Stewart gently corrected Al, much to the co-anchors’ amusement. Stewart adds, though, that she holds the utmost respect for her livestock. “They’re beautiful, they’re lovely birds. They gobble back to me when I gobble to them. It’s an autumnal beautiful remembrance of days past.”
In addition to talking about her flock of fowl and her quest for a Guinness World Record by building a garden maze on her property, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover star gave her two cents on a polarizing fall flavor: pumpkin spice.
“So, speaking of autumn, I would like you to weigh in on this, Martha,” said Al. “What say you on the pumpkin spice?”
“In a pie, I love it. In anything else, I do not love it,” Stewart replied.
“Yes! Yes!” Al exclaimed, clearly encouraged by her answer. “The queen has spoken. By royal decree, get rid of the pumpkin spice.”
“I don’t like cappuccino with pumpkin spice in it, I just don’t,” Stewart stated emphatically.
Al has never been shy about his feelings on pumpkin spice lattes. In 2020, he went “on the record” about how much he hates them.
“There’s no pumpkin in it. It’s chemicals, it’s artificial flavoring — just why?” Al said at the time. “OK, if you want it in your coffee, fine. But you start putting it in all these other things, it doesn’t taste good!”
Funnily enough, even though Stewart said she enjoys pumpkin spice in pie, her own pumpkin pie recipe on our site utilizes Chinese five-spice powder. That popular spice blend does contain two pumpkin-pie spice components though, cinnamon and clove, in addition to star anise and more. Wrapped in a dramatic phyllo dough crust, Stewart’s pie is a wholly unique — and Al-approved — pumpkin spice-free autumnal dessert.
Five Spice Pumpkin Pie with Phyllo Crust by Martha Stewart
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
