Every autumn, pumpkins undergo a rather dramatic change in career.
One minute they’re vegetables – botanically fruits, if we’re being particular – sitting quite happily in the kitchen. The next, they’ve acquired triangular eyes, a crooked smile and a candle where their insides used to be.
Then Halloween passes.
The costumes go back in the cupboard, the sweets mysteriously disappear and thousands of pumpkins are left wondering what happens next.
The answer doesn’t have to be the bin.
A fresh pumpkin can provide far more than a lantern. The flesh can become soup, curry, pasta sauce or cake. The seeds can be roasted. Cooked pumpkin can be frozen for another day, while scraps that genuinely can’t be eaten can often be composted.
The trick is knowing what can be saved, what should be eaten and, importantly, when a pumpkin has reached the end of its edible life.
So, before you carve this year’s masterpiece, fetch a bowl.
There’s dinner in there.
First, are carving pumpkins edible?
Let’s clear up one of the most common pumpkin questions.
Yes, carving pumpkins are generally edible – provided they’re sold as edible pumpkins and are fresh and sound.
The problem is flavour rather than possibility.
Pumpkins grown primarily for carving tend to have thinner, more watery and less flavoursome flesh than varieties selected specifically for cooking. A culinary squash or eating pumpkin will usually give you a sweeter, denser result.
But that doesn’t mean the flesh scooped from a fresh carving pumpkin needs to go straight into the food-waste caddy.
Before you carve it, remove the usable flesh and seeds with clean utensils and refrigerate anything you’re planning to cook.
Once a pumpkin has been carved and displayed, however, things change.
More on that shortly.
Save the pumpkin flesh before you carve
The easiest way to make Halloween more zero-waste begins before the first triangle is cut.
When preparing your pumpkin, scoop the seeds and stringy centre into one bowl. Then remove any usable flesh into another.
How much flesh you can remove depends on the pumpkin and your carving ambitions. You still need to leave the walls thick enough for the lantern to hold together.
A collapsing jack-o’-lantern may be memorable.
Just perhaps not for the intended reasons.
Fresh pumpkin flesh can be refrigerated and cooked soon afterwards, or cooked and frozen if you aren’t ready to use it immediately.
And there are plenty of places for it to go.
Make an easy pumpkin soup
Pumpkin soup is one of autumn’s great acts of transformation.
A pile of roughly chopped vegetables goes into the oven looking fairly unremarkable and emerges ready to become something warm, silky and deeply comforting.
It’s also forgiving enough for carving pumpkin flesh, particularly when you roast it first to concentrate the flavour.
Easy roasted pumpkin soup
Serves 4–6
You’ll need:
- 1kg pumpkin flesh, cut into chunks
- 1 large onion, roughly chopped
- 2 carrots, chopped
- 3 garlic cloves, left in their skins
- 2 tbsp rapeseed or olive oil
- 1 tsp ground cumin
- ½ tsp ground ginger
- 750ml vegetable stock
- Salt and black pepper
- A little cream or crème fraîche, optional
Heat the oven to 200°C/180°C fan/Gas 6.
Put the pumpkin, onion and carrots into a large roasting tin. Drizzle with the oil, scatter over the cumin and ginger and season lightly.
Roast for 35–45 minutes, turning once, until the vegetables are tender and beginning to caramelise around the edges.
Squeeze the roasted garlic from its skins and put it into a large saucepan with the roasted vegetables and stock.
Bring to a gentle simmer for 5 minutes, then blend until smooth.
Add a little more stock or water if you’d prefer a thinner soup. Taste and adjust the seasoning.
Serve with a swirl of cream or crème fraîche if you fancy it, preferably alongside a substantial piece of bread.
October suddenly seems much more manageable.
Turn pumpkin into purée
Pumpkin purée is one of the most useful things you can make from surplus flesh because it can head in several different directions afterwards.
Roast chunks of pumpkin until completely tender, then scoop or cut away any skin and blend the flesh until smooth.
If the pumpkin is particularly watery, put the purée into a sieve over a bowl and allow some excess liquid to drain away.
You can then use it in soups, sauces, curries, cakes, muffins and other bakes.
Divide it into useful portions before freezing and label the containers.
This last step is worth doing.
Three months from now, an unidentified orange block in the freezer could be pumpkin purée.
It could also be something else entirely.
Nobody needs that sort of suspense before dinner.
Make a quick pumpkin pasta sauce
Pumpkin’s gentle sweetness works particularly well with garlic, sage and cheese.
For an easy sauce, soften a chopped onion in a little oil or butter. Add garlic and a few sage leaves, then stir through cooked pumpkin or pumpkin purée.
Add enough vegetable stock to loosen the mixture, simmer briefly and blend until smooth.
Toss through hot pasta with grated Parmesan-style hard cheese or another suitable hard cheese, plus plenty of black pepper.
A little crème fraîche can make the sauce richer.
Pumpkin that was destined to become a lantern at lunchtime has now become supper.
That’s a respectable day’s work for any vegetable.
Or fruit.
We’ll come back to that.
Roast the pumpkin seeds
The seeds are perhaps the most satisfying bit to rescue because they so often disappear into the bin with the stringy centre.
Separate them from as much of the pulp as possible, then rinse them thoroughly.
The important next step is drying.
Wet pumpkin seeds tend to steam rather than roast, which isn’t terribly helpful if crispness is the objective.
Crispy roasted pumpkin seeds
You’ll need:
- Seeds from 1 pumpkin
- 1–2 tsp oil
- A pinch of salt
- Your choice of seasoning
After washing the seeds, pat them thoroughly dry with a clean tea towel or kitchen paper.
Spread them out and leave them to air-dry further if you have time.
Heat the oven to 180°C/160°C fan/Gas 4.
Toss the dry seeds with just enough oil to coat them lightly, plus salt.
Spread them in a single layer over a baking tray and roast for around 10–20 minutes, stirring once and watching carefully towards the end.
Smaller seeds will cook more quickly than larger ones.
Leave to cool before eating.
For variations, try adding smoked paprika, cumin, chilli, garlic granules or a little cinnamon before roasting.
They’re good scattered over soup and salads or simply eaten by the handful.
Particularly while standing in the kitchen wondering where the rest went.
What about the stringy pumpkin insides?
You know the bit.
The slippery tangle of fibres surrounding the seeds that makes pumpkin carving feel briefly like a biology lesson.
Once you’ve removed the seeds, these stringy fibres aren’t especially appealing on their own. But if they’re fresh and clean, they can be cooked along with other pumpkin flesh when making stock or soup, then strained or blended as appropriate.
If that feels like rather more commitment than the quantity justifies, put them into your food-waste collection or home compost.
Zero-waste cooking doesn’t mean every strand has to become a canapé.
Sometimes composting is the sensible use.
Can you eat pumpkin skin?
Sometimes.
The skins of some pumpkin and squash varieties soften beautifully during cooking and are perfectly pleasant to eat. Others remain tough even after a long spell in the oven.
So rather than assuming every pumpkin needs peeling, check the variety you’re using and consider how it will be cooked.
For varieties with edible, tender skin, leaving it on saves time as well as waste.
If the skin remains too tough to eat, it can go into the food-waste collection or compost once removed.
There is no prize for chewing determinedly through an unpleasant piece of pumpkin skin simply to prove a point.
Freeze leftover pumpkin
If pumpkin soup has already appeared twice this week, the freezer is your friend.
Raw pumpkin can be peeled, deseeded and cut into chunks before freezing, although its texture may soften after defrosting. That’s usually no problem when it’s destined for soup, curry or purée.
Cooked pumpkin and pumpkin purée freeze particularly well for recipes where texture isn’t important.
Freeze portions in clearly labelled containers and use them later for:
- soup
- curry
- pasta sauce
- risotto
- cakes and muffins
- mashed pumpkin
- stews
Freezing smaller portions makes life considerably easier than freezing an entire pumpkin’s worth in one container.
Unless your usual recipe begins with “feed twelve people”.
Add pumpkin to curry
Pumpkin is particularly good at absorbing other flavours, which makes it a natural candidate for curry.
Fry onion, garlic and ginger until softened, add your preferred spices and then stir in cubes of pumpkin.
Add chopped tomatoes, coconut milk or stock and simmer gently until the pumpkin is tender.
Chickpeas, lentils or spinach can be added to turn it into a more substantial meal.
This is also a good destination for a pumpkin that’s perfectly edible but slightly lacking in flavour.
Coconut, ginger, garlic and spices are very forgiving companions.
They don’t ask awkward questions about whether the pumpkin was originally purchased because it had a particularly good shape for a face.
Bake with pumpkin
Cooked pumpkin purée can also find its way into sweet baking.
Its mild flavour works well with cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, chocolate and orange, while the purée adds moisture to cakes, muffins and loaf cakes.
If you’re using a home-made purée rather than a recipe’s specified product, bear in mind that different pumpkins contain different amounts of water.
A particularly wet purée can change the texture of a bake, so allow excess moisture to drain before using it.
And no, pumpkin doesn’t have to become pumpkin pie.
It has other ambitions.
Can you eat a pumpkin after it’s been carved?
This is where sensible zero-waste advice matters.
A pumpkin that has been freshly cut up in the kitchen and handled as food is one thing.
A jack-o’-lantern that has spent hours or days sitting on a doorstep is quite another.
Once carved, pumpkin flesh is exposed to bacteria, mould, insects, dirt and fluctuating temperatures. A candle inside can add heat and soot to the equation.
So don’t plan to eat a pumpkin after it has been carved, displayed and left at room or outdoor temperatures.
Instead, save any edible flesh and seeds before carving.
This gives you the best of both worlds: dinner from the fresh pumpkin and a lantern for Halloween.
Trying to turn a week-old doorstep decoration into soup isn’t thrift.
It’s a regrettable culinary experiment.
Don’t dump old pumpkins in the countryside
Once Halloween is over, social media often fills with suggestions to leave pumpkins in woods or fields for wildlife.
It sounds generous.
But dumping pumpkins in the countryside isn’t a good idea.
Leaving food where it doesn’t naturally belong can attract animals to inappropriate places, create litter and introduce material into habitats where it wasn’t meant to be.
If you’d like to help wildlife, it’s better to follow advice from a reputable local wildlife organisation about suitable food and feeding practices rather than abandoning a jack-o’-lantern in the nearest woodland.
Your pumpkin has had an eventful life.
It doesn’t need a final excursion.
Compost your old jack-o’-lantern
If you have a home compost heap, an old carved pumpkin can make a useful addition once any candles, decorations, stickers and other non-compostable materials have been removed.
Cutting the pumpkin into smaller pieces will help it break down more quickly.
If you don’t compost at home, check whether your local council accepts pumpkins in its food-waste or garden-waste collection.
Different councils have different arrangements, so it’s worth checking locally rather than assuming.
Either way, returning the pumpkin’s remaining organic matter to an appropriate composting or food-waste system is a much better ending than sending it to general waste where an alternative collection exists.
From soil to pumpkin and, eventually, back towards soil again.
Not a bad ending for something that spent Halloween with a candle in its head.
What about painted or decorated pumpkins?
Not every Halloween pumpkin is carved.
Painting pumpkins has become a popular alternative, particularly with younger children, and an uncut pumpkin may last longer than a carved one.
But think ahead if you’re hoping to compost it afterwards.
Paint, glitter, glue, plastic decorations and other craft materials may not belong in your compost heap or food-waste collection.
Remove anything non-compostable first and follow local guidance.
Better still, if you’re decorating a pumpkin at home, consider decorations that can be removed cleanly afterwards.
Pumpkins have enough to deal with without being covered in plastic glitter.
Keep pumpkins for longer
Not every pumpkin needs to meet its fate on 31 October.
Whole, mature pumpkins and winter squash can often be stored for a considerable time if they’re sound and kept in suitable conditions.
Choose fruit without cuts, bruises or soft patches and keep it somewhere cool, dry and well ventilated.
Check stored pumpkins occasionally and use any that begin showing signs of deterioration.
Once cut, however, pumpkin needs to be treated as fresh food: refrigerate it promptly and use it within a sensible period.
A whole pumpkin may be patient.
Half a pumpkin is rather less so.
And yes, pumpkin is technically a fruit
Since we’ve danced around the subject long enough, we might as well settle it.
Botanically speaking, pumpkins are fruits because they develop from the flower of the plant and contain seeds.
In the kitchen, however, we generally treat them as vegetables.
Both descriptions can therefore make sense depending on whether you’re talking to a botanist or deciding what to put in tonight’s curry.
This information is best used carefully.
Announcing halfway through dinner that everyone’s eating fruit curry may not improve the occasion.
The best zero-waste pumpkin starts before Halloween
Perhaps the easiest way to waste less pumpkin isn’t to find increasingly inventive uses for an old jack-o’-lantern.
It’s to plan before you carve it.
Choose an edible pumpkin if you want to cook with it.
Set aside usable flesh before carving.
Wash and roast the seeds.
Freeze whatever you can’t use immediately.
And once the lantern has finished glowing, compost it or use the appropriate local food-waste collection rather than trying to turn it back into dinner.
Zero-waste cooking doesn’t require us to eat every stalk, skin and stringy bit.
It’s simply about recognising when good food is hiding inside something we’ve started thinking of as a decoration.
So this Halloween, before the pumpkin gets its grin, give it another look.
Scoop the seeds.
Save the flesh.
Make soup.
Then carve away.
The pumpkin can still look terrifying.
Dinner doesn’t have to.
Further Reading: My Garden Journal & Notes
