I saw lots of amazing pumpkins at the Farmers Market this past Saturday and I was a little afraid there wouldn't be anymore around closer to Thanksgiving. And we might not have any of the rest of the meal, but we WILL have pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving. Not to mention I want to try making this Pumpkin-Oatmeal-Chocolate chip cookie recipe. So, I decided to try and preserve some pumpkin to get me through the rest of the season. I did some reading and decided to go with freezing . It was ridiculously easy, which is kinda my style.
I started with 1/2 of a monster of a pumpkin - I am guessing it weighed about 8 or 9 pounds (the half, not the whole). The pumpkin needs to be cooked and pureed - I decided to 'roast' in the oven. I scooped out the guts, split the half into three pieces, brushed liberally with vegetable oil and a bit of salt, and placed on a baking sheet.Turns out that baking sheet (read MY ONE AND ONLY baking sheet) does not fit in my tiny little European oven. So I moved them onto my pizza stone which worked out just fine. Until I realized they were touching the top of the oven and I had to move the rack down to like the bottom one. Finally I got them to fit in the oven. I baked at 200C (about 400 F) for roughly two hours. It was nice and soft and the peel came of easily.
I scooped out the flesh into a bowl. Here's where I got a little creative. I have no idea if this is going to affect my pumpkin puree or not - but I drained off quite a bit of liquid. It was just swimming in it. There was still quite a bit of liquid in the puree when I was done - but it just seemed like too much at first.
Then I scooped the puree into containers for freezing - I got 2 2-cup containers and 2 1-cup containers for a total of 6 cups of pumpkin puree. Thats enough for a lot of baking - one recipe of cookies takes 1 cup of puree.
I let the puree cool down to room temperature then stuck them in my freezer. Now I have handy fresh pumpkin anytime I want to do some baking. Yay!
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