The Pumpkin Purée Preparation Perplexity
Several weeks ago, I purchased 3 smallish pumpkins from a display at Bearss Groves that had a sign - “sugar pumpkins” - intending to make pumpkin purée from scratch. They were easy to carve open and roasted quite nicely, yielding about 7 pounds of purée. I froze some, made pumpkin bread and pumpkin pie.
Great! I hadn’t done this for many decades, since I lived in New England and tried it. The purée I made then was pretty awful - not the taste, but the texture, which was stringy. I’m older and I hope, wiser.
Yesterday, I went back to purchase a few more since they were on sale after Halloween. They’d moved them, I thought, so I asked and was pointed to the baking pumpkins. I bought 4 for 10 dollars. At home, I prepared to roast 2 of the 4. First step is cutting out the stem and splitting them in half. I thought, hmmm, these are kind of hard, as I tried to stab my paring knife into the top of the gourd. It was so hard, I tried the other pumpkin. It was the same as were the other 2. This prompted me to wonder if they were actually not quite ripe.
Research after the fact tells me that baking pumpkins can have a harder shell. Ya Think?!! I managed to get a Ginsu steak knife to saw a circle around the stem since I didn’t want to break my good paring knife. I then tried a series of knives to see if I could saw the thing in half. By this time, I was sweating and swearing up a storm. Various knives used to little or no avail:
At this point, my husband came in and suggested a machete. Fine. Either that or a chainsaw. I suppose a machete is less cleanup. He took the gourd I hadn’t already butchered outside and managed to cut it relatively in half after a few glancing blows which cut off some shards.
I can see the difference. Baking pumpkins, besides having a shell like a freaking macadamia nut, have a lot less stringy flesh and roast beautifully. I tried to cut a bit off the bottoms so that they wouldn’t roll on the baking sheet. HAHAHA. Just lean the damned pieces against each other.
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