How seven pumpkins became 3.75 gallons of home-roasted pumpkin purée.

• 

• 

Last year, we made an irrevocable (but honestly, unsurprising) discovery: Homemade pumpkin purée really does taste better in pumpkin pie and pumpkin bread than what’s in the can from the store! I make a lot of pumpkin bread. Justin always makes his grandmother’s pumpkin chiffon pie for the holidays. So…we will likely be roasting our own pumpkins every fall for the rest of our lives.

---

Two years ago, we felt weird about throwing away Miryam’s multiple pie pumpkins she’d picked out from the various pumpkin patches we’d visited to let her toddle around throughout October. They’re called “pie pumpkins”…why don’t we try to cook them?

Unfortunately, our attempt at homemade purée that year was so runny that Justin’s pie wouldn’t set, and my bread took foreverrrr to bake through. We were disappointed, but undaunted.

At one of the pumpkin patches we took our kids to last year, Justin discussed our previous year’s failure with the patch owners over piping hot cups of apple cider. They indicated their favorite type of pumpkin for home roasting and eating, the Blue Hubbard, so we bought the biggest one they had, along with the kids’ pie pumpkins, of course, and took them home to roast them up.

We knew we needed to get rid of excess moisture this time. Reduce…simmer…but that’s a LOT of pumpkin, too much for our regular pots….

Crock pots!

Justin had the genius idea to borrow my mom’s crock pot. Between ours and hers,  we were able to simmer all of the purée overnight, until it was reduced to the consistency of the canned stuff at the grocery store.

Eureka! It substituted perfectly for canned pumpkin in both our favorite recipes, except with so much more depth of flavor. As we realized that making it homemade “really is that much better,” we also realized we’d assigned ourselves hours of work during all our future Novembers. It was a classic case of “the hard way” being “so worth it.”

Another, smaller, benefit to home roasting is that we were able to package and freeze it in exactly the amounts we would want to use at a time, eliminating the possibility of the last quarter cup from the can going to waste over and over.

---

This year, we started with seven pumpkins: Justin picked out three from the farmer’s market, the kids and I each picked one from the pumpkin patch, and I also picked one at Aldi, because it was only $3, so why not?

I will note that the kids willingly submitted their little pumpkins to our roasting fest! They know what pumpkin bread is and are happy to contribute to its creation.

We may have gotten a little carried away with our pumpkin acquisition this year. As soon as we started cutting them open last weekend, I started thinking to myself, This is going to be twice as much as last year. But Justin had done more research and knew he wanted to try a couple of new varieties, and the kids and I weren’t going to let him do all the choosing.

Were seven pumpkins necessary? Absolutely not. But did it make for a fun day-long family collaborative project in the end? Oh yes, it did.

Last year, we had about 2 gallons of purée after simmering. This year, we ended up with 3.75 gallons. That’s enough for 30 loaves of pumpkin bread and 6 pumpkin chiffon pies, plus a little extra. Needless to say, it should last us all year.

Interested in bringing the deliciousness of home-roasted pumpkins to your fall baking? Keep reading to learn how.

---

How to Roast Your Own Pumpkins

Step 1. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F.

Step 2. Cut the pumpkin in half such that it will fit, cut side down, on a baking sheet.

We cut most of them through the stem, but the Blue Hubbard had to be cut around the belly and shaved a bit on the edges to fit. If the stem is tall, trim it, too. One stem almost caught fire in our oven last year.

Step 3. Remove and discard guts and seeds.

Step 4. Salt the flesh and let it sit for at least ten minutes, to draw out excess moisture.

Then, wipe it off with a dry wash cloth, paper towel, or what we used: a clean burp cloth.

Step 5. Line a rimmed baking sheet or roasting pan with foil and place the pumpkin halves in it, cut side down. Pour about a quarter cup of water into the pan. Bake in preheated oven for 30-60 minutes,* or until the flesh is tender/you can easily poke through it with a fork.

*Baby pumpkins will take about 30 minutes. All our other pumpkins took 45-60 minutes. The Blue Hubbard’s skin is never penetrable by a fork—check for doneness by looking for boiling/bubbling around the edge where it contacts the baking sheet, or by squishing it (wearing oven mitts) to see if it gives at all.

You may have to do this step in more than one batch if you have a large pumpkin. Since we had seven pumpkins—some of them quite large—it took us a few hours just to bake them all.

• 

• 

• 

Step 6. Remove from the oven and carefully flip over each half (using oven mitts or something to protect yourself!) to release steam, and let it sit until cool enough to handle.

I cut each half in half again, to make it less cumbersome/dangerous, before flipping.

Step 7. Scrape the roasted flesh away from the skin, and use a food processor or blender to purée.

• 

• 

Step 8. Transfer purée and any liquids left on the baking sheet into a slow cooker. Turn cooker to low, put the lid on cockeyed to vent, and simmer until reduced by about ⅓, or until your purée’s consistency is pretty close to what you would find in a can—at least 12 hours. Stir occasionally.

We simmered for almost 24 hours this year to get the consistency we wanted. You cannot skip this step if you want to use your purée in recipes that call for canned pumpkin. Trust me, your pie won’t set. By the end of simmering, your pumpkin will be an appetizing dark autumn orange, unlike the yellow-orange store-bought canned variety.

I highly recommend using slow cooker liners for this! Cleanup is a breeze with these.

Step 9. Use your homemade purée for baking, just as you would canned pumpkin; package it into freezer-friendly containers to use later; or serve it up like applesauce to your kids (and yourself, of course).

What is your favorite recipe that uses pumpkin? Tell me in the comments below!