How to Bake a Whole Pumpkin

For most of you, this post will be a great one to pin on Pinterest for this Fall.  You can also utilize our 'search box' on the right hand side of the blog anytime you remember reading about a recipe or topic, but don't know how to quickly find it.  Once you type in your search words and hit enter, the search results will be displayed at the top of the blog, and you can easily find the recipe you were wanting!

Our garden produced pumpkins earlier than we expected this year, and I still wanted to utilize the pumpkins we had!  There are many great recipes that use pureed pumpkin!  We have cooked pumpkins in the past, but we cut them into chunks first.  Not only was this difficult and time consuming, it was also a messy clean-up process.  When I read about cooking the pumpkin whole on Heavenly Homemakers blog, I knew this was something I needed to try.  I was so happy with the results, and pleased with how little effort it took to get yummy pumpkin puree!

How to Bake a Whole Pumpkin

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Place pumpkin in a baking dish.  Poke the pumpkin 8 or 10 times with a knife, around the outside.

2. Bake the pumpkin for approximately an hour and a half.  It should be easy to poke with a fork when it is finished cooking.

3. Cut the pumpkin in half, and allow to cool.

4. Once cooled, use a metal spoon to scrape out the seeds and stringy parts.  Save the seeds if you would like to make delicious roasted pumpkin seeds!  (post coming soon about those!)

5. Cut the rind from the pumpkin.  Put chunks of cooked pumpkin into a blender or food processor until smooth. 

At this point, you can either use the pureed pumpkin, or freeze it to save for future recipes.  If you choose to freeze it, it is nice to know what you might use it for (pumpkin bread, muffins, etc.) so you can freeze it into appropriate amounts. It is much easier to pull out a bag of frozen puree in the exact amount you will need for a recipe!

Enjoy!