Making pumpkin purée á la mashed potatoes was my plan from the start of the year. And although my pumpkin harvest was pitiful this year, I did, in the end, get enough butternut pumpkins to try it out. I did not take any pictures, and the recipe is very simple. I handled them pretty much exactly as I would potatoes:
Cut circa 2000 kg butternut pumpkin into small cubes and boil in water for 10 minutes. Decant the water, add 150 g of butter and a spoonful of salt, and crush with a potato masher into a paste. Because pumpkins are less starchy than potatoes, adding milk or water is not needed.
The result looked remarkably like mashed potatoes. It had the same consistency, too. The flavor was very different, though, which is to be expected. We ate it with air-fried fish fingers, and I liked it. I am going to try it tomorrow with spicy sausage.
We were using pumpkins as ersatz potatoes in many foods for years, so this is just another recipe in the repertoire.
“Cut circa 2000 kg butternut pumpkin”
Presumably that should have been “Cut circa 2000 g butternut pumpkin”
@paul Durrant, oh, how the f did I do that typo? You are, of course, correct.
I would pay to see 2000kg pumpkin ;-)
You can also use mashed pumpkin to make Späzle. Just substitute part of the liquid with blended pumpkin and you have added some healthy veggies.
@Giliell, that does sound interesting. We never made Späzle, but we often make our own pasta. I will think about a way to introduce pumpkin into other foods. So far, I am the only one who liked the purée, so we cannot make that too often -- my parents need to enjoy the food too.
@chigau, I’d love to see a 2000 kg pumpkin too, but it is unlikely to ever happen. And definitively not in my garden. The biggest pumpkin that we ever grew was around 60 kg when I was a kid. We stopped growing giant pumpkins because they generally taste blander than smaller ones and they are a pain to process -- quite literally. Back then, we had poultry and occasionally a pig, so nothing was wasted. I do not want to keep animals, so we only can grow what we can eat ourselves.
Mr J brought in the first squash of the year, perfect, but petite just 560g it fits into my cupped hands. There are apparently more, but they are still growing/maturing, this one got harvested because something had eaten through the vine below where it was growing.