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[kupukello]

What to do with a 2.5 kg pumpkin?One of Bramble's home-grown pumpkins (moved to granny's yard after window-sill growing at home) has produced a decent sized pumpkin that now waits to become... WHAT? I've found recipes for pumpkin pies (are they any good?), and a recipe for pumpkin bread (that looks more like a sweet bun than anything else), even a

Comments

[amelia_eve]

You can use it just like you would any other yellow squash, really. One thing to keep in mind when you are dealing with US-based pumpkin instructions is that pumpkins here are mostly grown for use as jack-o-lanterns. That means they are mostly hollow, with a thin shell of flesh and an open interior with lots of seeds. My experience with Euro-pumpkins is that they are actually grown for eating, and are therefore much more solid and meaty, with only a small seed cavity inside.

Here's a really comprehensive page on how to go from a pumpkin to a pie, including metric measures and substitutions. Note that in the US, evaporated milk is also called condensed milk, but it is not the same thing as sweetened condensed milk, which is what you see more in Europe and Latin America. Evaporated milk has a similar consistency to ordinary milk (liquid, not gooey) and a slightly "cooked" taste on its own. It has been boiled down from fresh milk to reduce its volume by half, so it is more concentrated. You could mess around boiling it, or you could just use cream. Yummy, yummy cream.

(I forgot my pumpkin icon the first time. This photo depicts a typical US jack-o-lantern pumpkin, and a pumpkin cheesecake, which is a variant on the traditional custard version. I stenciled the jack-o-lantern on top of it using a paper cut-out and a mix of cocoa powder and cinnamon.)

[kupukello]

I've once used AMERICAN condensed milk for something but it was quite hard to find any here. I had no idea you had even more of the odd stuff, and that they are all not the same! Thanks for the warning!

The site is VERY good, thank you for the link! The metric measurements are nice, the author has made a small error though. Euro and US tea spoons are the same size and I can't quite think what kind of equipment you'd need to measure 1.25 grams :D ½ tea spoons of vanilla extract is a bit less than 20 grams of the stuff, LOL!

What do you think, how much different is the result if you STEAM the pumpkin compared to baking it in the oven? We have large double pot steamer, so that sounds like an easier way than stuffing the halves to oven and then poking them at intervals? Our microwave oven is way too small to do it all in one go, though.

[amelia_eve]

I think you could go with steaming if you follow her instructions. She has a lot of advice about how to get the excess water out, so if you do that, you should be fine. All types of custard have a tendency to "weep" a bit as they cool, but the one pie I made from a boiled pumpkin gave off so much extra water I had to spoon off the top. If you use her straining methods, you should be fine.

And as I said, you Euro pumpkin probably has a lot more flesh than the kind we grow for jack-o-lanterns. The one time that I made a jack-o-lantern in Italy, I had to scrape out a lot of the pumpkin flesh from inside to be able to carve the face. The natural cavity was so small it would have barely held the candle! Some people here draw the face on the pumpkin with markers. If you don't cut into it, the pumpkin will last quite a long time. And since you don't eat the skin, you can still use it once it's been marked. Draft your design with a wax crayon, which you can rub off easily if you change your mind. And of course, try to use the natural features of the particular pumpkin to give the face more personality.