Last updated: September 11, 2026
Key Takeaways
- Pumpkin pie spice contains no pumpkin. It is a blend of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves and allspice.
- Cinnamon is the backbone of the blend and typically accounts for about half the total volume.
- A common home ratio is 4 parts cinnamon, 2 parts ginger, and 1 part each of nutmeg, cloves and allspice.
- Allspice and pumpkin pie spice are not the same thing. Allspice is a single dried berry; pumpkin pie spice is a blend that contains it.
- There is no sugar in pumpkin pie spice. It reads as sweet because these five spices appear mostly in sweet food, not because anything in it is sweetened.
The name is the most misleading thing in the spice cupboard.
Pumpkin pie spice does not contain pumpkin. It never has. The name says where the blend is going, not what is in it.
What is in there is five spices, and one of them does about half the work. Get the proportions right and you get that specific smell that arrives the second the bag opens. Get the cloves wrong and the whole thing tips medicinal.
There Is No Pumpkin In Pumpkin Pie Spice
It is a reasonable thing to assume. It is also wrong.
Pumpkin pie spice is named the way a birthday candle is named. Nothing about it is made of birthday.
The blend is five ground spices, and each one has a job:
- Cinnamon — the backbone. Warm, sweet, and the flavour most people are actually identifying when they say “that smells like fall.”
- Ginger — the lift. Bright and faintly sharp. Without it the blend goes flat and heavy.
- Nutmeg — the depth. Woody, a little sweet, sits underneath everything else.
- Cloves — the intensity. The smallest measurement in the blend and the one most likely to take over.
- Allspice — the joiner. It ties the other four together because it already tastes a bit like all of them.
That last one confuses people, and fairly. Allspice is a single dried berry, not a blend of anything — it just happens to taste like cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves having a quiet conversation.
If you came here because you were about to use one in place of the other, the full comparison is here. Short version: allspice is one ninth of this blend, so swapping them at equal measure does not work.
What is not in it: pumpkin, obviously, and in most cases no sugar, salt or flour either. Some blends do include anti-caking agents or sweeteners. The ingredient list will tell you which kind you have.
The Ratio Most Recipes Use
Five spices. One of them takes up roughly half the blend.
Here is the ratio most home recipes land on, written in parts so you can scale it to whatever quantity you need:
| Spice | Parts | If you use tablespoons |
|---|---|---|
| Ground cinnamon | 4 | 4 tbsp |
| Ground ginger | 2 | 2 tbsp |
| Ground nutmeg | 1 | 1 tbsp |
| Ground cloves | 1 | 1 tbsp |
| Ground allspice | 1 | 1 tbsp |
That makes nine parts total, with cinnamon holding nearly half of it.
Published recipes disagree, and they disagree in a predictable place. Cinnamon and ginger are stable across almost every version you will find. The arguing happens over cloves and allspice, which is why some recipes drop those two to half a part each.
There is a reason for that. Cloves are the salt of this blend — a little makes everything else taste more like itself, and too much tastes like a dentist’s office.
If a recipe lists the spices separately and you want to use a ready-made blend instead, add the separate measurements together. A recipe calling for 1 tsp cinnamon, ½ tsp ginger and ¼ tsp nutmeg needs 1¾ tsp of blend.
If you want to read up on why cinnamon behaves so differently depending on where it was grown, TasteAtlas has a good breakdown of the main types.
What Pumpkin Pie Spice Actually Tastes Like
Open the bag and the first thing you get is cinnamon. Wait two seconds and the rest turns up.
It arrives in layers. Cinnamon leads, warm and rounded, and ginger cuts across it almost immediately with something brighter and slightly sharp.
Nutmeg settles underneath. Cloves and allspice hold the finish, which is the part that lingers after you have swallowed.
The whole thing reads as sweet. There is no sugar in it.
That is your memory doing the work, not your tongue. These five spices appear in sweet food far more often than savoury food, so the brain files the smell under dessert before the flavour arrives. Vanilla pulls the same trick.
There is no heat in it either, in the chili sense. Ginger and cloves both have a faint prickle, but nothing in this blend will make you reach for water.
One practical consequence: it works in plain oatmeal or unsweetened coffee without any sugar added.
Make It Yourself Or Buy It Blended
Making your own looks cheaper on paper. On the shelf, it usually is not.
To blend it yourself you need all five spices, ground, in the house. If you already keep cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves and allspice and use them regularly, blend away — you will get to control the ratio, which is the one real advantage.
If you do not, you are buying five containers to use a teaspoon of each, once a year. Ground spices lose their aroma faster than whole ones because the volatile oils sit exposed. By next autumn, four of those five are tired.
It is like buying five paint colours to mix one shade. You end up storing four tins you will not open again.
Proportion matters more than the list of ingredients, and we can prove that from our own shelf.
Our Ras el Hanout contains cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves and allspice — every single spice in pumpkin pie spice — along with cumin, coriander, turmeric, cardamom, cayenne and dried rose petals. Nobody has ever mistaken it for pie.
Our Pumpkin Pie Spice Blend is those five spices and nothing else, in a 113g resealable pouch, balanced so the cloves stay where they belong.
Where It Goes Besides Pie
Pie is where the name came from, not where the blend stops.
- Coffee and lattes — stir it into the grounds before brewing rather than into the finished cup. It disperses instead of floating.
- Oatmeal and overnight oats — a quarter teaspoon per bowl.
- Pancakes, waffles and French toast — into the dry ingredients.
- Muffins, banana bread and cookies — swaps one-for-one with plain cinnamon and gives you more depth.
- Roasted squash, sweet potato and carrots — with olive oil and a little salt.
- Apple anything — crumbles, sauce, baked apples.
- Whipped cream — folded in at the end, not whipped from the start.
Roasted carrots with pumpkin pie spice sounds wrong until you have eaten it once.
The blend is built for sweet-leaning food, so it works anywhere there is natural sugar to meet it — which covers most autumn vegetables.
How Much Pumpkin Pie Spice To Use
After what is in it, this is the thing people ask most. The honest answer is that it depends on what you are making far more than on how big the batch is.
Here is a starting scale. These are opening bids, not rules.
| What you are making | Start with |
|---|---|
| One 9-inch pumpkin pie | 1½ to 2 tsp |
| A loaf of pumpkin or banana bread | 1½ to 2 tsp |
| 12 muffins | 1½ tsp |
| A batch of 24 cookies | 1 to 2 tsp |
| A bowl of oatmeal | ¼ tsp |
| One coffee or latte | ⅛ to ¼ tsp |
| A pound of roasted squash or carrots | ½ tsp |
Start at the low end. Cloves are the reason — every other spice in this blend fails gracefully, and cloves do not.
The classic pie recipes most people grew up with list the spices separately and add up to somewhere between 1¾ and 2 teaspoons of blend. If yours does that, total them and use the sum.
One thing that catches people out: doubling a recipe does not mean doubling the spice. Go up by about half again, taste the batter, and adjust from there.
Frequently Asked Questions
What spices are in pumpkin pie spice?
Cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves and allspice. Cinnamon usually accounts for about half the blend.
How much pumpkin pie spice do I use in a pumpkin pie?
Start with 1½ to 2 teaspoons for one 9-inch pie. Recipes that list the spices separately usually total somewhere in that range.
Does pumpkin pie spice contain pumpkin?
No. The name refers to the pie it seasons, not to anything in the blend.
What can I use if I don’t have pumpkin pie spice?
Cinnamon on its own covers most of it. For a closer match, use 4 parts cinnamon to 1 part each of ginger and nutmeg.
Is pumpkin spice the same as pumpkin pie spice?
In almost every case, yes. “Pumpkin spice” is the shortened name that stuck once the blend moved into drinks.
How much pumpkin pie spice replaces the separate spices in a recipe?
Add the separate measurements together and use that total. One teaspoon of cinnamon plus half a teaspoon of ginger plus a quarter teaspoon of nutmeg becomes one and three quarter teaspoons of blend.
Why is pumpkin pie spice associated with autumn?
Pumpkins are harvested in autumn and these five warm spices are the traditional seasoning for the pie. The spiced latte, launched in 2003, turned a baking blend into a season.
Where did pumpkin pie spice come from?
Spiced pumpkin and squash pies appear in English and American cookbooks long before the blend was sold pre-mixed. Selling the five spices together in one container is a twentieth-century convenience, not a new recipe.
Does pumpkin pie spice go bad?
It does not spoil, but it fades. Ground spices lose their aroma within about a year of opening, and a tired blend tastes flat rather than wrong.
Where can I buy pumpkin pie spice in Canada?
Directly from Edi Gourmet Spice with free shipping across Canada, or on Amazon.ca.
Where To Buy Pumpkin Pie Spice In Canada
Most Canadian supermarkets carry a version from September onward, shelved with the baking spices rather than the seasonings. Outside those two months it can be hard to find at all, which is the most common reason people end up mixing their own in November.
If the shelf is empty and you need a workaround tonight, the substitute guide covers what to use instead.
Five spices, no pumpkin, and cinnamon doing about half the work. If you keep all five ground and use them often, mix your own and tune the cloves to taste. If you do not, one balanced pouch will outlast five containers you open once a year.
Ours comes two ways: direct from this site with free shipping across Canada, or on Amazon.ca. Same 113g resealable pouch either way.
👉 Shop Pumpkin Pie Spice Blend — free shipping across Canada