Homemade Pumpkin Puree

It's practically impossible to find canned pumpkin here in Denmark, believe me I've been searching for a more than a year. You can order canned pumpkin online from various sites, but 3 cans of pumpkin will cost about $50 (USD) to have shipped. That's pretty outrageous! 

Because my pumpkin cravings got the best of me, I decided to break down and make my own. Normally this wouldn't be such a challenge, but pumpkins can be hard to come by here, especially baking pumpkins. I decided to use what was available, a carving pumpkin.

 Carving (or Jack-O-Lantern) pumpkins are large, stringy, and less sweet compared to the smaller baking pumpkins, which are made for cooking. Thankfully, this can be easily remedied by roasting, pureeing, and adding about 25%-50% more spices when baking.

Pumpkin Puree

Starting with your whole pumpkin, size doesn't matter (really, it doesn't), cut it in half and scrape out the pumpkin guts. I found it easier to cut most of it out with a knife and then scrape what was left. It doesn't have to be perfect.

Once your pumpkin is cleaned out, slice it into large chunks.

Then, you will place the slices skin up on a roasting pan. Fill the pan with about 1 1/2 cups of water, and rub the exposed areas of the pumpkin with oil or butter. (Whatever kind of fat you wish to use. I have an oil sprayer and gave mine a generous coat of olive oil.) Pop in the pre-heated oven at 420F/220C for 40-50 minutes. Mine were perfect at 45 minutes.

 Once removed from the oven I placed the pumpkin in a pan on paper towels to drain and peeled the skin off with a fork. The skin should just lift right off. After the skin was removed I transferred the pumpkin to my food processor and pureed it. (I also forgot to take pictures of this part)

Pumpkins are full of water, so you will need to strain the puree. I've seen and heard of a gazillion different methods, how you wish to proceed is entirely up to you. I placed a colander atop a bowl and lined the colander with a tea towel and poured the puree into the tea towel. Then I gathered the tea towel and began squeezing as much of the liquid out as I could. This process took about 10 minutes, maybe 15. If you don't want to squeeze, I suggest choosing a different method.

It's hard to see from this picture, but this is about 1/2 full of water, and I emptied it 2 more times after that.

I kept squeezing the water out until I felt my puree had the consistency of canned pumpkin puree.

I then transferred the drained puree into a bowl to cool and wait for the next batch to finish. I got about 3.38 pounds of pumpkin puree from a 12-ish pound pumpkin. 

 

 

Now I'm ready for my fall baking!

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