Pumpkins are great – they are beautiful, they taste good, and they are easy to grow and easy to store. If you get a 20 or 30 pound beauty, though… well, it isn’t the same as opening a can of puree. First, you need to figure out how to cook that much food at once, and second, you need to either use 20-30 pounds fairly quickly, or preserve it until you can use it.

The best thing to do is use it up quickly, because then you don’t have to worry about keeping your fridge and freezer packed with pumpkin, and neither do you have to go to the bother of drying it or boiling it down (although you can keep reading for instructions on how to do that).

If you’re going to eat a lot of pumpkin in, say, a week or two, it really pays to have some variety so it stays fun. In the States, we normally eat pumpkin as dessert: either pie, or as a sweet bread (which is really more like a cake). If you have a lot of pumpkin, you can expand that to creamy soup, chunky soup, regular yeast bread, curry, pot roast, roasted pumpkin squares, mashed pumpkin, pasta, pancakes, pumpkin grilled cheese, and more.

I’m not sure why pumpkins became relegated to just dessert, because they really are a fine starchy vegetable for any of the uses you’d use other starchy vegetables for. Anyway…

On this page, I’ll share some tips for preparing, cooking, and storing a large pumpkin, a few personal recipes, and links to *tons* of other mouthwatering recipes.

Storage before cooking

Keep your pumpkin cool and dry, and it will probably last a long time. Inspect it periodically, and if there is any sign of it starting to get a bit old (like softening, spots, wrinkling, etc) then you’ll want to cook it up soon so you don’t loose it.

Preparation and cooking

Wash or wipe off the outside of the pumpkin to clean away dirt and debris. Carefully (did I say carefully?) cut the pumpkin in half. You’ll want to use the heaviest duty knife you have, and it should be sharp. Get the tip of the knife into the shell to start it, and then slice back and forth as you make your way through it. Take your time and saw through it, carefully.

Scoop out the seeds and the stringy stuff from the middle. If you squeeze the seeds out from the stringy stuff, you can salt, season, and bake them and for a fun snack. You can find a recipe for that here.

Use a baking tray with a lip, or cake pan, or something else that is big enough to hold a pumpkin half. Put about a half inch or so of water in the bottom of it (this will keep the inside of the pumpkin from drying out), put the pumpkin in the dish cut side down, and bake at 350 F for about an hour, or an hour and a half, or until the meat of the pumpkin is soft. You can test this with a fork, or a knife.

Take care that the water doesn’t all evaporate away, and also take care that when you pull it out of the oven you don’t slosh the hot water around. The tray will be heavy, so move carefully and deliberately.

If you don’t feel comfortable working with something that heavy, or if you don’t have a large enough tray for your pumpkin, then cut the half into smaller pieces and cook them in what you have. If you do this, still put a half inch of water in the bottom of the container. The shell won’t be protecting the meat from drying out, though, so you will need to cover it with with a lid or foil. Otherwise the process is the same.

If you want to make puree, cook it nice and long until the meat is very soft. If you would like to have some meat a little firmer, so you can cut squares for making chunky soups or curries, then don’t cook it as long.

When it is done cooking, let it cool. If you can use potholders to safely turn it upside down, so the cut side is facing up, it will cool down much faster. Be careful if you do that, though, because there will be a waft of hot steam from the internal cavity.

Making cubes, mash, or puree

Make sure the pumpkin is cool, first! Don’t burn yourself.

To make cubes, pull the skin away from the meat of the pumpkin, then cut into the size of cubes you want.

To make mashed pumpkin, well, mash the pumpkin! You can use a potato masher, or food processor, or whatever you would do to mash potatoes.

The easiest way to make puree is by using an immersion blender. You can remove the skin, put all the meat in a big stock pot, and hit it with the immersion blender for a few minutes. Depending on how good your immersion blender is, this will be more or less smooth. You can also use a regular countertop blender to work through a little bit at a time. If the pumpkin wasn’t cooked quite long enough and is still a little too hard to make a nice smooth puree, you can cook it on your stovetop on low to medium heat to soften it up. Make sure you stir often enough so it doesn’t scorch!

Storing cooked pumpkin

If you have a dehydrator or know how to dehydrate with your oven, you can dehydrate the puree or cubes for long-term storage. It is not recommended to can pumpkin, because the acidity varies a lot, so it is difficult to know if it will be safe from botulism.

You can also store cooked pumpkin in the refrigerator for about a week before it starts going bad, and in the freezer for much longer. How long depends on what freezer you have, and how well you keep the air out!

Cooking with your pumpkin!

Now for the fun stuff. Making tasty food! Bake a traditional pie and pumpkin bread, and give some away. Everybody loves a little of this every year. I don’t have a particular recipe for those — just use your favorite, or ask a friend for theirs. In the recipes, you can substitute 2 cups of your homemade pumpkin puree for one 15oz can.

The magic, though, and how you can make it through a *ton* of pumpkin, is to prepare more dishes than just desserts.

Soup

One of our favorites is a simple pumpkin soup. Brown an onion in butter or oil in the bottom of a medium pot, then add equal parts pumpkin puree and liquid. You can use stock or water. For a fall-spice soup, add pumpkin pie spice. For a more european flavor, add Herbs Provence (or thyme, rosemary, and savory). Once it is heated up, blend with an immersion blender or your countertop blender, and serve!

Optionally, you can add milk, cream, soy milk, almond milk, or etc to make a luxurious, creamy soup. You can do a spicy soup with black pepper, cayenne, and ginger, or a super simple soup with just some Ms. Dash or any other spice mix you like. Or substitute a few cloves of garlic for the onion. You can grate a cup or two of cheddar into it, too, if you like.

The thing to remember is that you don’t really need a recipe for this! It is very forgiving and open to experimentation. Add flavor, puree, and liquid, heat it up and blend it and you’ll have a hearty soup.

If you want a chunky soup, use cubes instead of puree, and don’t blend it.

Yeast bread

The sweet, cake-like pumpkin bread most of us love is wonderful. There is only so much of it a person can eat, though. And given how sugary and oily it is, only so much of it that a person *should* eat. You can add pumpkin to a regular bread recipe, though, and enjoy it that way.

Take any bread recipe you have, and try substituting a cup of puree for 1/2 cup of water and 1/2 cup of flour. If the recipe calls for 2 cups of water and 6 cups of flour, you could start by using 2 cups of pumpkin puree, 1 cup of water, and 5 cups of flour.

The exact amount of water in your puree will vary, of course, depending on how you cooked it, what variety of pumpkin it is, how it was grown, and whether the summer was particularly dry or wet. This is the glory of cooking from fresh, real ingredients – it will always be different! Use your intuition and feel it out. Add the flour a cup at a time, or maybe a half a cup at a time, and if it starts to get too thick then stop adding flour, even if the recipe calls for more. Trust your feelings. If the bread comes out too wet, then next time you’ll know to add a bit more flour, and if you don’t have a good intuition for dough now, you’ll earn one over time.

Here are a bunch of recipes, to give you ideas: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/16/pumpkin-recipe_n_1916231.html

Mashed pumpkin

Serve some of your mashed pumpkin with salt and butter, and enjoy! Alternately, you can take some puree and call it “mashed pumpkin”. Or take some cubes of pumpkin, and mash those. Same deal.

Baked pumpkin cubes

Coat some pumpkin cubes with olive oil, and sprinkle with salt and a seasoning: like black pepper, Herbs Provence, garlic salt, cajun seasoning, curry powder, anything! Bake at 350F until the corners start browning nicely.

Pot Roast

Prepare a pot roast how you normally would – and add some pumpkin cubes to it.

Pumpkin grilled cheese sandwhiches

I have not tried this yet, but plan to! It looks amazing.

And more. Many, many more…

Here is a list of 39 different savory dishes you can make with pumpkins. Check out the list, there are things I hadn’t dreamed of doing with pumpkins. Remember, you can come up with things like this, too! Just take any recipe that you enjoy, and see if you could swap out or add puree, mash, or cubes. You’ll be surprised at how much pumpkin you can eat!