Ingredient

Pumpkin

The large orange pumpkin sold for carving and the pumpkin worth cooking are usually different varieties, and this is the single most useful thing to know about them. Carving pumpkins are bred to be big, round and hollow. Cooking pumpkins are bred to be dense, dry and sweet.

Which pumpkin to cook

Carving pumpkin

Watery, stringy, thin-walled and bland. It will cook, and the result is disappointing. Roast it hard and drain it if you must use one.

Crown Prince

Blue-grey skin, dense orange flesh, very sweet. Among the best available in Britain and worth seeking out.

Kabocha

Japanese. Dark green skin, dry, floury, chestnut-sweet. Excellent, and the skin is edible when roasted.

Onion squash / red kuri

Small, orange, teardrop-shaped. Sweet, dense, thin edible skin. Very good and increasingly common.

Butternut

Technically a squash rather than a pumpkin and the most reliably available — see butternut squash.

Tinned pumpkin purée

Made from dense cooking varieties, consistent, and genuinely good for pie and soup. Not a compromise.

How to cook it

• Roast it, always, before anything else. Wedges or halves, cut side down, hot oven, until browned and collapsing. Roasting drives off water and concentrates sugar; boiling does the opposite.
• Then purée it for soup, pie or a sauce, or use the roasted wedges as they are.
• Do not peel it before roasting. The skin comes away easily once cooked, and on kabocha and onion squash it is worth eating.
• In soup, roasted first, with warm spice — cumin, coriander, chilli, ginger — and something acidic at the end.
• In a curry or a tagine, in chunks, where it holds shape.
• In risotto and pasta, roasted, with sage and brown butter.
• Pumpkin pie, which needs a dense variety or a tin. A watery pumpkin makes a watery pie and no amount of technique fixes it.
• Keep the seeds — see pumpkin seeds.

Storing it

Whole winter squash and pumpkins are a keeping crop and one of the best-value vegetables in autumn for that reason. A sound, uncut specimen with its stalk intact keeps for weeks and often months in a cool, dry, airy place — a garage or a larder rather than a fridge, which is too damp.

The things that shorten it are damage and damp. A cut or bruise is where rot starts, and a pumpkin sitting on a cold damp floor will go before one on a shelf. Leaving a good few centimetres of stalk on helps considerably; a pumpkin with its stalk pulled out has a hole in the top.

Once cut, wrap the exposed face and refrigerate, and use it within a few days. Cooked pumpkin purée freezes very well, which is the sensible thing to do with a large one you cannot get through.

Breaking one down

A large pumpkin is heavy, round and hard, and cutting one badly is a genuine way to hurt yourself.

1. Put a damp cloth under the board so it cannot slide.
2. Cut a flat slice off the stalk end, so the pumpkin has a stable base and cannot roll.
3. Stand it on that flat end and cut down through it from top to bottom, working the knife in stages rather than trying to drive it through in one go. Rocking the blade is safer than forcing it.
4. Once halved, scoop out the seeds and fibres with a spoon — an ice cream scoop works well — and set the seeds aside.
5. Cut each half into wedges. Roast them skin-on, cut side down, and peel afterwards if the recipe needs it; the skin comes away easily from cooked flesh.
6. If the whole thing is fighting you, pierce it several times and microwave it for five minutes first. It softens just enough to make the first cut safe.

Common questions