Amish Cheese Pumpkin

Last year, we bought a wonderful pumpkin from Brett and Johanna at 5 Penny Farm. It kept in our basement until March! When we roasted it, the flavor was amazing. We'd never had a pumpkin like. When I learned the name was an Amish 'cheese' pumpkin, I wondered if the Amish made pumpkin cheese? Turns out they are named for their shape, not their potential combination with dairy products. So we saved some of the seeds and tried planting them. We under estimated the space that a pumpkin vine needs, but it found a way and became a hanging pumpkin.

Turns out that it worked pretty well as it ripened perfectly with no rot. We got some bizarre stinky bugs all over the vine later in the season, but Jake's diligent hand removal kept the vine alive.

We harvested it several weeks ago in anticipation of Thanksgiving and the weekend we roasted it up to help lighten the kitchen load in coming weeks (pumpkin puree freezes beautifully).

The finally result was about 10 lbs. So we cut it.


Cleaned it out (saving the seeds for next year of course!)


And roasted it up.


The flesh of a 'cheese pumpkin' is much less watery. We found that after 45 minutes it was just falling away from the skin in many places (which makes for easy scooping). The roasted pumpkin flesh needs to be processed through a food mill to remove the 'stringy' bits. We tried our Foley foodmill (again).

Before giving up (that thing never seems to work very well for us!) and resorting to our new favorite purchase, a food mill attachment for our Kitchen Aid mixer.


The end result was 6 cups of beautiful, bright orange pumpkin puree.

We measured it into 2 cup freezer containers (most recipes call for 1 can of pumpkin, which equals about 2 cups of puree, so this makes for easy baking). Two went into the freezer, where their shocking orange color stands out! While the other went into the fridge for a test pumpkin pie. That's a pretty incredible yield - 10 lbs = 6 cps puree (and for reference, 2 cup waste from the food mill).

We only grew one pumpkin this year. Luckily we could buy three more from 5 Penny. We are saving seeds again from this pumpkin but through these links:
http://www.cherrygal.com/pumpkinamishpieheirloomseeds2008-p-5089.html
http://rareseeds.com/seeds/Squash-Winter/Amish-Pie-Pumpkin
you can get some heirloom Amish Pie Pumpkin seeds of your own. (or we'd be happy to share ours with you when we crack open the next one! - leave us a comment.)