Updated Sep. 13, 2019.  Originally posted Nov. 5, 2012.

I haven’t cooked pumpkin for a few years, but we went to the pumpkin patch this year and, now that the “decorative” pumpkins we picked have served their purpose, we wanted to make use of them. 🙂

How to Cook the Pumpkin (in a pressure cooker)

They were a little dirty, so I washed them off first.  Then I cut off the tops and set them aside to be discarded.  If you have a very tiny pumpkin, you can just scoop out the “guts” from here.  If it’s a bit larger, you’ll need to cut it anyway, so you might as well cut it first and then scrape out the junk.  Don’t throw this stuff away yet, though, because we’re going to roast the seeds!

Once the pumpkins are cut into small enough chunks to fit, and all the stringy, seedy mess scraped out (I just used a large metal spoon), you can put them in the pressure cooker.  Add the minimum amount of water your cooker needs to pressurize, and the “tray” for the bottom (to keep the pumpkins from sitting in the liquid), toss in the pumpkin, lock on the lid, and bring it to pressure.

Pressure-cook the pumpkin for 8 minutes, then remove it from the heat and let the pressure come back down.  (I use a stovetop pressure cooker, but you should be able to do this in the InstantPot.)

While the pumpkin is cooking, prepare the seeds.

Put all of the seeds into a bowl of water, and swish them around. We’re cleaning off the “goop,” and I found it pretty much took 3 “passes” of this process.  The first pass, give it a swish, then scoop up a chunk of especially goopy seed mass.  Pick off the seeds and toss them back into the bowl.  Be sure you’re sticking your fingers in between the fibers, because some of the best seeds like to hide down inside.  It feels a little like picking out watermelon seeds.  Discard the flesh.  Keep doing this until all of the big chunks are gone.  At this point, it looks something like this:

Pour it through a strainer, then back into the bowl and add more water.  Swish it really well with your fingers, then strain it again.  Repeat this one more time.  By this last time, I found that that seeds and the flesh that’s left “float” differently in the water, so I could swish, then immediately scoop up a handful of seeds, and mostly leave the icky stuff behind.  (It gets a little trickier when you’re down to the very bottom, but it’s not too bad.)  After this third pass, they should be pretty much clean.

Pour the seeds back into the bowl (rinse it out first if you need to), and fill it with salted water to cover the seeds.  Leave it to soak overnight.   By now, your pumpkin should be ready for the next step.

Return to the pumpkin.

After pressure-cooking the pumpkin, it will be very soft.  The skin should more-or-less slide off – or at least scrape off – of the flesh.  I did find that larger pumpkins have a thicker skin, and it’s a bit easier to get off.  (It just separates all by itself.  The thinner peel tends to need to be scraped.)

I like to scoop it carefully out of the pot and into something shallower to let it cool.  (And because I usually have to cook it in at least two batches, so I need the pot!)

(This is one of the thinner-skinned pumpkins, and I had to scrape it out of the peel.  The photo above is of the thicker-skinned pumpkins, and you can see how the skin just came completely loose.  I was able to just lift it off.)

Be VERY sure the pumpkin is cool enough before you touch it!  (I got into too big a hurry and burned my fingers.)

Toss it into a blender as you go, setting the peels aside.

Whir it in the blender for about 5 seconds or so, to purée it.  Then it’s ready to go.  (There’s a little smidge of peel in the blender, there at the left, that snuck in.  I saw it and pulled it out before I blended up my pumpkin.  In case any eagle-eyed readers caught that and thought we ate the peel. 😉 )

When it’s good and cool, you can put it in baggies or containers for the freezer.  I like to do it in 1-cup increments.  (A measuring cup works well as a scoop.)  When you use this in recipes, be aware that it’s a bit more liquid-y than canned pumpkin, so you might need to decrease the liquid in your recipes a tad.

I also took the liquid from the bottom of the cooker and strained it into a jar.  We’ll throw it into smoothies or something.  Here’s the unusable portion we were left with:

(Those seeds are the ones that were undeveloped, so they’re very small and/or very thin.)

The next day, roast the seeds.

Pour the seeds into the strainer to drain off the water.  Give them a “rough” drying with a towel or paper towel.  (They don’t have to be super-dry; it just helps them to not cling together too much.)  Spread them out on a rimmed baking sheet.

Roast for 10-20 minutes at 325, or until crunchy and just starting to turn golden.  If you have a thick layer, you might want to stir them once or twice during the cook time.  Then after 10 minutes just test one every couple of minutes to see if they’re crisp.  Don’t overdo it, or you’ll burn them. 😉

That’s it!

It doesn’t take as long as it might sound like it took.  Probably about an hour the first day, and then just roasting the seeds the second day – and I had a good bit of pumpkin.