Practice English Speaking&Listening with: Pumpkin Season - How to Make and Use Pumpkin Puree

Hi, Welcome to Daddykirbs Farm.

Last Week I showed you how I cut these pumpkins and cleaned them out and utilized the seeds.

Take a look at that but this week we're gonna talk about how to use the flesh of the pumpkin.

Now why would you want to eat the pumpkin? For many people the pumpkin is either a holiday

decoration or a pie filling. But there is so much more to this pumpkin that is good

for you. It is full of vitamins like A, C and E... and minerals like Potassium, Copper,

Magnesium and much more. These are jam packed full of nutrition. Now this particular pumpkin

and all of these are not Sugar Pumpkins. Those are the ones that are preferred for your holiday

meals. They are a little sweeter. These are more bland but still packed full of nutrition.

We learned earlier this year that pumpkin filling, the kind you get in a can, is good

for dogs. You put it on their dog food and it helps their digestive system. It just helps

keep them regular and healthy. We found that we were buying about one fifteen ounce can

of pumpkin per week. That's ok, but it can't be nearly as good as saving my own. So what

we're doing is taking the pumpkins that we get for free and pureeing them, and saving

that puree so we can save money and give our dogs a higher level of nutrition throughout

the year.

Keep in mind that when you are feeding your livestock you don't have to do all this. You

just open the pumpkin up, beat it with a ball bat, lay it out and they will eat it up all

the way down to the rind. But this is mostly for the benefit of our dogs.

Sometimes we'll take the puree and put it in a smoothie or in a bread recipe or something

like that. We made pancakes one time and that turned out pretty nice. But, I'm going to

show you how to make the puree and you can decide what to do with it for yourself.

We're gonna use one baking sheet that has a lip. It will get a little messy so we want

to try to contain that liquid. We are lining it with parchment paper. It helps the cleanup

because it will, like I said get messy.

The pumpkins really should be baked upside down. Now since I have lots of pumpkins to

choose from I'm going to try to maximize how much I get in the oven by filling this tray

up. I'm going to go ahead and cut this one again. There I was able to get three quarters

of one pumpkin on one tray. Now we're going to put this in the oven and we're going to

bake it until the knife slides through the skin with no resistance.

After cooking for about an hour at three hundred and fifty degrees, these large pumpkins are

pretty soft and ready to be pureed.

You do want to give the pumpkins time to cool off a little bit. I've heard, I've never experienced,

but putting a very hot pumpkin in a blender could be catastrophic.

Plenty of people will show you how to peel the skin before pureeing, but the skin is

perfectly edible and once pureed it just adds vitamins and minerals.

It is a good idea, when using a blender with warm ingredients, to point the spout away

from you just in case it decides to overflow a little bit.

So, here in the Vitamix we're going to start on a variable low speed and then work up to

a high speed to puree.

After pureed you should have this beautiful gourmet baby food look. And, it actually looks

really delicious. You can if you want to strain this through cheese cloth to get some of the

moisture out, but I just don't see the need.

In my How to Make Fermented Hot Sauce video I forgot to taste it. I'm going to give this

a nibble. It's definitely not a Sugar Pumpkin, it's not very sweet but it does taste like

pumpkin.

In our house some of this is going directly into the refrigerator to use all week long

to put on the dog food. But, most of it we are choosing to put into the freezer in quart

sized bags so we can pull it out and use a little at a time. I've heard that you can

can pumpkins, but it's not a good idea to can pumpkin puree because it's too dense and

could be unsafe.

We take our baggies and once we get them about half full... smoosh out the air, zip it up

and lay it flat. Put that on a cookie sheet or a plate and put it the freezer. And, then

once it's completely frozen you can stack them up to save space in the freezer.

Thank you so much for sharing this time with me here on Daddykirbs Farm. I hope you enjoyed

this short video about How to Make and Use Pumpkin Puree. I thought also what better

way to end a video about pumpkins than with a cat named Pumpkin. Do you like that Pumpkin?

Be sure to look video last week about How to Use Pumpkin Seeds and the health benefits

there.

Thanks again, I'll talk to you soon.