Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
It's that time of year again. I'm baking huge pumpkins and putting pumpkin in the freezer to use in recipes for the rest of the year.
You can get the seeds out with less flesh by raking your fingers through the strings. Get the seeds out, rinse them off, pick off any pumpkin that is still on them.
While they are still wet, I put on a very generous coating of salt. Place them on a cookie sheet. Then I top with a twist of fresh ground sea salt.
Into the oven at 350, just until the coating of salt has dried on the surface. That will cook the kernel just the right amount.
I use a silicon baking sheet on the cookie sheet, just for ease of clean up. The baking sheet is not necessary. Clean up on a bare sheet is easy. The salt will soak right off.
I use the cooked pumpkin for pumpkin muffins, but I also use it to make dog food, so in the fall I do a couple of enormous pumpkins.
I boil the pumpkin seeds in salt-saturated water, then I take them out and bake in the oven. Boiling them first "puffs" them up and separates the inside kernel from the hull.
I bought pie pumpkins for the last 2 years and they do not last long at all. My porch looked cute for Halloween, but I see they are spoiling already. It was 78 degrees on Halloween night, so not like in the north.
I'm a canned pumpkin fan because of this.
do you use the field (jack-o-lantern) pumpkins or the pie/sugar pumpkins?
I bake with the jack-o-lantern pumpkins.
They have excellent flavor. They are more watery than pie pumpkins, so occasionally a recipe has to be modified. Usually, I can use the recipe as-is with no problem.
I don't often see pie pumpkins for sale and I haven't had huge success with growing them. It's not like I would not use them if I could get them. I can get lots of jack-o-lantern pumpkins and fresh pumpkin beats the pants off of canned pumpkin.
And you can do the same with winter squash seeds. They are smaller and bake a little faster.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
