Pumpkin Research, Part 2

The pumpkin beer and associated research got me to wondering about the various kinds of pumpkins for sale at our local greenmarkets. Last weekend I bought two sugar pumpkins, and two cheese pumpkins, roasted both, and used both in the same pumpkin pie recipe.

The rind of the cheese pumpkin is very pale when compared to the sugar pumpkin, but the flesh is much more orange. The roasted and mashed pulp of the cheese pumpkin is on the left. Both were roasted at 350 F for 1 hour, the scaped from the rinds and mashed with an electric mixer.

The cheese pumpkin produces a great deal of liquid when roasted. 11 lbs (before cleaning) of cheese pumpkin filled the jellyroll pan they were roasting in full of amber juice. Next time I'll save it and see if I can use it in the mash of a pumpkin beer. After the flesh was scraped from the rinds, I put it in a strainer to drain some more. Cheese pumpkins have a lot of water. The seeds (which I roasted as well) were smaller than the sugar pumpkin seeds, and harder to clean from their strings.

The difference in color was also noticeable in the Bourbon Pumpkin Pie. Again, the cheese pumpkin is on the left. The recipe called for 15 oz. of pumpkin, a standard can size. The next time I make this recipe, I'll round it up to 1 lb and mix it in a blender to reduce any left over strings in the pumpkin. The taste difference, if any, is very subtle.

I'll do a first taste test of the pumpkin beer this week. If I like where it's headed, I'll make another batch, but this time using cheese pumpkin to see how it affects the color.