Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Freezing Pumpkin


My house smells wonderful today! The smell of baking pumpkin permeates every room. The smell of autumn. I cleaned one of the pumpkins and decided to put the meat in the freezer. Later I will cut some in chunks and put in jars but for now I will put it in the freezer. First I selected a pumpkin that had a slight bruise on it because I knew that it needed to be the first to be canned so as not to rot. So I washed it and cut it in half.  


The seeds were removed and put in water to get all the remaining stringy stuff off of them.


The two halves were then put on a cookie sheet cut side down in a 350 oven and baked until soft.






Then taken out and cooled to the touch. Then you could just take a spoon and scoop the soft meat out and put in a bowl to finish cooling.




The pumpkin skins went in the chicken feed bucket.



The cooled pulp went into a colander to completely drain any remaining water from the cooked meat.


The pumpkin meat was then put into 2 cup freezer containers. The average pumpkin recipe calls for 15 ozs or one can of pumpkin puree. Later I will also freeze some in 1 cup containers for the recipes that call for 1 cup or odd amounts of puree.  They were then frozen.


The washed seeds were put on a cookie sheet and coated with a little melted butter and sea salt and toasted in a 300 oven for about 30 minutes.




 Normally they would be put in an air tight container but the family smelled them. There were none left but I did manage to get one picture before they were completely devoured!



And one pumpkin down with nothing wasted at all. A mountain of them to go!

Blessings from The Holler

The Canned Quilter

5 comments:

  1. Haha. I LOVE it!
    I was thinking that pumpkin looked like pie to me. I bought a large can of pumpkin and made 2 pies yesterday myself. :)

    I am going to save this because I want to grow my own pumpkin when we have our own chickens and I will need to know all this stuff.

    I love those little screw top containers, by the way. Aren't they great? I used a couple to freeze some home made broth. :)

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  2. Well Sis, I just posted about freezing pumpkin too! Then I saw your post. You have great pictures and you grew your own, so you get a great big high five from me!!

    My one Amish Pie Squash that was so big and beautiful on the outside was rotten on the inside......we almost cried too :-(
    So I bought some pie pumpkins to freeze. I also put mine in measured quantities and it makes it so easy to use when you need some.

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  3. It's so much easier to bake them-I do mine that way too : ) your post makes me want one of Granny's Pumpkin pies-hers are always better than mine.

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  4. I just did pumpkin here too! Your pumpkins are lovely.

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  5. How long is it good in the freezer?

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