Category: All Things Pumpkin

As I’ve been testing the recipes for my pumpkin cook book, I’ve been trying each recipe with both canned and fresh pumpkin. Some recipes, such as Baked Stuffed Pumpkin or Pumpkin Curry, require fresh pumpkin because the shell or chunks of pumpkin meat are used. However, a vast majority of pumpkin recipes use pumpkin puree, for which you can use canned.

Brooke Dojny writes in her cookbook, “Dishing up Maine,” that after much trial and error, she has found that “it’s really not worth the trouble” to use fresh pumpkin. “in fact, canned pumpkin is superior in some ways because the puree has been cooked down to a properly thick consistency.”

I have to agree with her. I’ve found no difference in flavor. And because fresh pumpkin puree often has a higher water content, I find I have to cook or bake recipes longer to account for it.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that Libby’s pumpkin is far superior to the generic canned pumpkin. Canned pumpkin isn’t that expensive, so splurge on the Libby’s^*. And before you leave the grocery store isle, check to make sure you have the pumpkin, and not the pumpkin pie mix. The latter has the spices and sugar already added in.

^{* Libby’s is not paying me to say this. They probably don’t even know I exist!}

Although the first fresh pumpkin I used in a recipe had once been my jack-o-lantern, I’ve since learned that there are different pumpkins for these uses.

Thayer Wine of the Gannett News Service wrote a wonderful little article — with recipes for pumpkin bread, pumpkin soup, orange-walnut pumpkin bars, and easy pumpkin cake — that explains a bit about the difference in pumpkins and their purposes. He also mentions the difference between canned and fresh pumpkin.

For example, did you know the Long Island Cheese pumpkin is sometimes called a “hog pumpkin”? Had you ever heard of a Long Island Cheese pumpkin? Did you know that four cups grated pumpkin equals 1 cup of pumpkin puree?

NOTE: Alas, the original article has been taken down. So I found this one instead.

You probably know that pumpkins are good for you because they are a good source of vitamin A and fiber. But did you know that they can be good for the environment, too?

New research, to be published later this year in Environmental Science and Technology, shows that pumpkins can clean up soil contamination with DDT and other pollutants.

Pollutants that don’t dissolve in water, such as DDT, PCBs and dioxins, are difficult to remove and the difficulty increases with time. Usually, to clean up contaminated areas, the soil is removed and either dumped in a landfill or incinerated.

Pumpkins offer an alternative through phyto-remediation – the use of plants to clean up contaminated soil. Basically, pumpkins could be planted in contaminated soil and destroyed after they’ve been harvested.

“Our research has shown that members of the Curcubita pepo species, including pumpkins, are particularly effective in this regard,” says Ken Reimer, PhD, a chemist at the Royal Military College of Canada and corresponding author of the paper.

The research compared rye grass, tall fescue, alfalfa, zucchini and pumpkin. Pumpkins took up the most DDET with zucchini, another C. pepo species, following at second. The researchers believe this to be the case because of the large mass and volume found in the species.

Vitamin A, an essential nutrient for eye health, can be found in two forms: retinol and beta carotene.

Retinol, which is found in liver, egg yolks and full cream dairy products, can be toxic if consumed in large amounts.

Beta carotene is a safer from of dietary vitamin A and can be found in red and yellow fruits and veggies, such as pumpkin.

A typical serving of pumpkin, 1 cup cooked, contains 2,651 IU vitamin A in beta carotene. For normal healthy adults the US RDA of vitamin A is 5,000 IU. Therefore one serving of pumpkins provides for more than half your daily allowance of vitamin A.

Earlier, I mentioned cross-pollination of pumpkins and winter squash. One thing I did not mention is that not all curcubits can cross-pollinate. In order for one curcubit, which includes squash, cucumbers and melons, as well as pumpkins, to pollinate another, they must be of the same species.

Pumpkins are of the Curcubita pepo, which also includes zucchini, cocozelle, acorn squash, crookneck squash and others. You can tell a C. pepo by its unique characteristics, which include:

• Uniformly colored tan seeds
• Lobed leaves with prickly hairs on the surface of the stems and leaves,
• Hard, roughly angled flower stocks (peduncles), and
• Male flowers with short, thick and conical stamens (androecia).

Pumpkins, as well as other plants such as tomatoes, peppers and corn, will not produce pollen if it is too hot. When temperatures rise into the upper 80s, poor pumpkin pollination is often the result. If the temperatures rise into the 90s, you might as well forget about pollination all together. Poor pollination results in low fruit yield, so the less pollination you get, the less pumpkins you’ll have come autumn.

So, as the climate changes, getting warmer earlier in the year, it is quite possible that your local pumpkin patch will have smaller yields and those farms in the warmest areas may need to switch to other crops.

Just some food for thought.