![]() ![]() ‘Cushaw’ seeds are available from Eden Brothers in various packet sizes. You’ll need to space these heirloom sprawlers at least four feet apart in the garden, and they’ll reward you for every bit of that space with a huge yield of sweet and tender cooking squash. With a lovely light color, it’s sweet and mild, tasty roasted, pureed for pies or custards, or steamed to add to salads and such. They grow to about 20 inches long, and creative decorators use them freely in harvest-theme and Halloween decor.īut the flesh, now, that’s pumpkin flavor all the way. They’re technically pumpkins, but you might not know that by looking at their curved necks and white and green striped shells. I’ve been fascinated with these creamy-fleshed winter squash ever since. My beloved first mother-in-law, Genevieve, let us keep the huge stash of frozen ‘Cushaw’ cartons in the freezer when we moved into her South Knoxville house and she moved a couple of blocks away. ‘Cinderella’ seeds are available from Eden Brothers. That gives you a bit of extra time to stock the freezer and rev up the canner for pumpkin savories from butter to soups to pickles. They also require a relatively short period from direct sowing to harvest, about 110 days. Orange fruits about 15 inches across look like the famed fairy tale carriage. ‘Cherokee Bush’ seeds in packets of 50 are available from Burpee. The fruits are five to eight pounds and the gold-yellow flesh is quite tasty roasted, used as a base for a cream soup, or pureed to add to batter for pancakes or muffins. This choice is one of the few bush varieties you can grow at home, though it still needs space since it can spread four to five feet. ‘Casper’ seeds are available from Eden Brothers in packets of various sizes. The 15-pound fruits can be harvested 115 days after planting, and the deep orange flesh is wonderful for use in dishes that are sweet or savory. You may not think of white pumpkins as something to eat instead of displaying them as unique decorations, but ‘Casper’ has delicious sweet flesh. To make that choice a little easier for you, I’ve selected 11 of the best cultivars to grow for cooking. Unlike a lot of garden favorites, these fruits are big and the vines require lots of space, nutrition, and water, so you probably won’t be able to experiment with more than one or two varieties. Oh, and you’ll need to choose which variety to grow first. Here’s the list of tasty cooking pumpkin options I’ll be sharing in a little more depth: ![]() Ready to put down the carving tools and pick up a fork and knife to enjoy your homegrown pumpkins? I’ll describe 11 of the best for eating, including one that’s white, a couple that are downright weird looking, and one that produces those handy hulless seeds that are delicious and easy to prepare. If you’re interested in learning more about growing your own pumpkins, we have a guide that will help you succeed.Īs for the best variety to grow for cooking, you can follow my lead or choose from other heirlooms and hybrids. I’ll probably use a couple of the gourds produced by the vines as part of a doorstep arrangement for fall, but you won’t catch me carving any of these heirlooms into jack-o’-lanterns!Ĭarving would render the flesh inedible, and I won’t waste a scrap of homegrown pumpkin that I could be cooking with. I plan to make roasted vegetable medleys, velvety soups, savory stews, and tasty bread with the fruits of this labor. These will take 95 days to grow, layer after layer of mulch, and deep watering throughout the summer before producing multitudes of tasty eight to 10-pound fruits. This type hails from Australia and is named after a town in Western Australia. This year, I’ve taken it into my head to grow the blue-shelled ‘Jarrahdale’ cultivar with thick orange flesh. I cooked creamy soups using thawed pumpkin in place of my usual butternut squash, added a few spoonfuls to tomato sauces to give them body and a touch of sweetness, and added the moist puree to pancake batters. I ended up steaming, mashing, and freezing about 20 pint jars of that flesh, and using it for the next nine months. It bore little resemblance to the tinny-tasting canned pumpkin I kept around the house so I could make the occasional loaf of pumpkin bread. When I grew an heirloom cheese pumpkin of uncertain origins a few years back, I was astonished that the flesh from the harvested and cured fruits was fresh, moist, and even a little sugary. The best cooking cultivars are fresh, dense, and sweet, and produce enough flesh for numerous meals and batches of baked goods. This garden vegetable takes a lot of space, water, and warm or hot weather to produce. If you buy from one of our links, we may earn a commission. We link to vendors to help you find relevant products.
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