This thread documents my growing of Cucurbita maxima. A branch of my other cucurbita landrace projects at culinary school.
2025
Results for maxima this year.
I grew these on 60 m2 and then a separate bed with seed that were more difficult to get hold of, e.g. because it had American origin or there were few seeds. Interestingly, my “prioritized bed” spectactularly failed and only produced one tiny Hubbard-type fruit. The bed were I used my own seed combined with seed from our own European community grew much better. Lots of genetics went into this: Sweet Meat, Lauras grex, Chloé’s, Hugo’s, Vivi’s Sweet Fall x Pink Banana, Thomas’ Good, Early and Excellent Keepers and more.
I should have booked the transporter wagon and not brought a small car to move that day. I know I like these kinds of pictures, so I thought you might too:
I let them mature inside in the school’s Green Laboratory as an exhibition until we will do tastings and select seed for next year.
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Community tasting
This project is branching out to include colleagues in my region, which means we have more opportunities for selection. Last fall we created a group when I had the Serendipity Seed Swap at my place and some of them got diverse maxima seed to grow this season. I am happy that this group has now grown to 22 members in a year and on a normal weekday way out of the city we were about 8-10 people around the table tasting pumpkin that one of the farms had grown.
We also had a winner - no. 2 that you see in the picture below. In my memory, it was very sweet and flavorful, good skin to cut and eat it. The runner-up had nice Hubbard-shape and size, good flavor that a lot of people liked but unfortunately was super tough to cut through. I was generally suprised by how high the baseline was - much better than last year’s tasting where there were more blands and mehs. Which is exactly what is supposed to happen when we select for flavor, so that’s encouraging for me!
As always, people also like slightly different things. We put the seed from each fruit so people could make their own mixes. For example, my mix was 80% of the winner, some of the runner-ups and a bit of some that I liked for other reasons.
My own pumpkin are still maturing at the school and I will do the first tasting of those in mid November.
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Season 2025 - Tasting no. 1
Brought ten pumpkin for tasting. Picked ones that seemed mature or edging towards not being able to keep anymore. Tasters were 16 chef students.
The tasting comes at the end of some theory input while in the kitchen. We discuss which criteria we like for a good squashand I remind the students to also notice new differences they didn’t know could be in squash. I let the students score on printed sheets in silence, to not affect each other. I also make sure to normalize differences in taste. Sometimes 90% of a group will agree on a taste and there will be a small subgroup that have very different taste. For example, some people simply pick more up on bitter flavors. Our tongues are not the same. These things can be polarizing, so it is important for precise scoring to normalize and encourage diversity of sensory experience.
One new aroma I haven’t picked up on before is barnyard - several tasters independently of each other picked this up on one fruit in particular. Think cow, hay, note of manure - sometimes ciders can have a bit of this. But it is pretty weird in squash. This particular fruit didn’t score well.
I both use quantitative scoring (scale 1-10) and use dialogue a lot.
The great thing about working with chefs is they are sometimes brutal in their assesments. 5 of the 10 got judged harshly.
3 fruits got the best score (no. 2 above being one of them). All of them were sweet - and some of them had interesting aroma (picking up on resinous flavors, for example).
One was average but had other good qualities (some interesting if a bit polarizing aroma), so I will save seed from that too.
That means I’m selecting 40% which is a bit higher than others. But I want some seed increase too as I’d like to grow on a larger area this year.
Students then got an open assignment to play and have fun:
Squash pancakes with dumplings (dough flavored with squash and stuffed with squash)
Pumpkin flavored ramen
Pumpking mushroom soup
Deconstructed pumpkin pie - warm spices biscuit with pumpkin purée and marenque
Sweet pumpkin tarte with pumpkin ice cream (which was delicious)
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Pumpkin ice cream sounds delightful!