pumpkin puree process

I get asked a lot about how I make pumpkin puree. We have managed a pumpkin patch for 4 years now, and I've made puree from pumpkins left over after sales were through each year. In years past, I've made puree out of 20-40 lb. pumpkins. This year, we had all smaller pumpkins left, so this year's puree was made from 40 pumpkins that all weighed between 2 - 4 pounds. 

The first step is wash the pumpkin. Then cut the pumpkin in half and remove the seeds and scoop out the pulp. From there, cut the pumpkin into medium-size chunks. With the small size of this year's pumpkins, I cut them into 4 pieces. After cutting the pieces, I place them face-down on a cookie sheet. When the cookie sheet is full of pieces, pour a 1/2 inch of water into the pan.

 

Bake the pumpkins in the oven at 375* for 1 hour. The skin of the pumpkin will begin turning brown, and the flesh underneath is soft.

The cooked pumpkins need to cool for 10 - 30 minutes, then when they are cool enough to touch, pull off the skins. The flesh is super moist. Place the flesh inside a food processor. Puree the flesh until it's smooth and there's no visible chunks.

Since it is still so moist, it needs to be strained. Pour the contents out of the food processor into wire-mesh collanders. This is the longest part of the process--it needs to be strained for a minimum of 30 minutes to get a lot of the water content out.

After the puree has been strained, pour 3 cups of it into a blender. I add 1/2 cup of sugar to the blend. But if you use pie pumpkins, adding sugar is not necessary. Since I've been using large pumpkins for the previous 3 years, I added sugar to sweeten the puree so that it wouldn't taste like squash. Mix the puree & sugar until well blended and sugar is dissolved.

Pour the puree from the blender into quart-size freezer bags. Squeeze as much air out of it before sealing the bag shut. Each bag is the equivalent of a 29 oz. can. Lay the bags flat before placing in the freezer (I stack them).

Once I've started a round of pumpkins, I do several rounds because the job is sticky & messy, and I hate cleaning it all up. So, if I can get as many rounds done in one day as possible, it's less clean-up than if I did one round a day for however many days. I start an assembly line and have several things going at once...it takes several hours to get a few rounds done, but I start getting in the groove.

I worked on making the puree this year for 3 days at the end of November/beginning of December (that's when I finally had the time to invest in the process). There were 40 pumpkins to do, and I'd been storing them inside my house since Halloween so that they wouldn't be subject to the frost outside. I divided the pumpkins into rounds. Each round consisted of approximately 3 pumpkins. The first two days I did 4 rounds, and the third day I did 6 rounds. It isn't difficult to make, just time-consuming. I've never made so much puree before--this year's total was 28 quart-size bags! It was tedious at times, but the end result was so rewarding! I love looking at all the completed bags of puree. And the homemade puree is so delicious! Recipes used with homemade pumpkin puree taste so much better than ones using store-bought canned puree. When using the pumpkin puree in a recipe, all you have to do is pull a bag out of the freezer, place in a sink full of hot water, and it's ready to be used in 20 minutes!