Fall, my favorite season, is coming into full swing. This means apples, nuts, and squash. The squash of the week, and probably the squash of next week too, is PUMPKIN! Now, I am not much of a pie person. I beg you to forgive that grave gastronomical blasphemy. However, whatever passion I lack for pie I make up for with my zeal for quick breads. Thus, I spent last week sifting through various pumpkin bread and pancake recipes. The problem came when I tried to find canned pumpkin.
Unbeknownst to me, canned pumpkin is a very American invention. In Germany, you buy the vegetable whole and puree, bake, or grate it yourself. What's more, there are two main varieties as far as I have seen. You have your typical jack-o-lantern style gourds. Then, you have something called Hokkaido. These are smaller, around 1kg. This makes them convenient for smaller scale cooking. They also have a skin that you can eat right along with the flesh. I picked one up yesterday and put it to good use this morning.
I roasted up the seeds, about 1/2 a cup from one pumpkin. I then shredded a third of the veggie-proper for my bread and baked the rest to later puree in the communal blender. The bread is too beautiful to last long in this world. The puree...let's just say that the blender is special. It suffers from the classic affliction of throwback. Throwback, a term I clearly did not make up off the top of my head, refers to when a blender blends when you first turn it on, but within seconds all the ingredients in contact with the blades have been thrown out of their reach and the mixture is too fill the gap left behind. When this happens, the mixture will not blend unless you pulse push ingredients down, pulse, push the ingredients down, etc. This had 1 major consequence for me; the pumpkin skin I had left on because the internet told me to ended up in pieces small enough that I could not pull them out but large enough that I could not cook with the mixture. I spent a lovely half an hour pushing the pumpkin mash through a sieve to repair the situation.
If the German cooking show, Lafer! Lichter! Lecker! that I have grown addicted to has taught me anything, it is that stick blenders are the way to go. They are to regular blenders what a hand mixer is to a stand mixer. They might not have as much kick, but they have less fuss. Furthermore, since you can move the blender wherever you wish inside the bowl, it resolves the throwback problem.
Pumpkin puree hint: First roast the pumpkin - cut in half, remove the seeds and slimy stuff, put face down on a baking sheet and roast in a 400 degree (f) oven for about 45 minutes. You can also do the same in a microwave if you cover the cut flesh with saran wrap that has been pierced allowing for steam to escape. When it's done, it should be soft and able to scrape out of the shell easily and mashed into a pure.
ReplyDeleteThe stick blenders are good if you're working with softened ingredients. Cheep ones will crap out soon - the blades bend and the motor looses it's power. Better blenders are cheeper than good stick blenders and can process more at a time.