We love pumpkin bread in my house and I love growing pumpkins. I’m wondering how you taste things like pumpkins and squash to decide which ones to save seed from. I processed the two pumpkins I had into puree a few days ago. I decided to save seed from one of them b/c it smelled more strongly of pumpkin; the other one hardly smelled at all! But I also saved back a bit of flesh and fried it up on the stove in a little cast iron pan and ate them when they were soft and slightly browned. I really didn’t taste a difference between them, but it might be due to my inexperience at tasting pumpkin this way.
How do y’all taste things like pumpkins and squash when deciding about seeds? Cukes you slice open and eat. Tomatoes you just eat. Fruit you pick and eat. How do you handle anything that you have to cook to eat? Eggplant, okra, potatoes? Do you set aside seed, and decide after eating?
Usually I cut a squash in half, pull out all the seeds, and set them aside. Then I nuke the flesh in the microwave a bit so it’s easy to cut into smaller chunks to eat (or pressure can to eat later). I taste some, and if I like it, I save the seeds. If I find it meh, I roast the seeds and eat them.
I usually make the shortest cut possible, because cutting a squash rind can be a nuisance. So if it’s a long, thin fruit, I cut it in half down the middle and have two long thin tubes to reach into and dig out seeds.
I advocate taking a tiny sliver of flesh (regardless of squash type or intended preparation) and tasting it raw to test for curcurbitacin. If it’s bitter, do not proceed. Now, my stomach is rather on the cast-iron end of things, but this practice has never caused me any problems. And there have been a couple of times which, if I’d done the taste test, I’d have saved the trouble of cooking something which was not worth consuming. :-/
As I had loads to taste test and because I felt that cooking would be too much work on top of the rest, I decided to taste all my pumpkins raw this year and transformed every one of them (about 500) into soup with a friends’ association.
Documented here: Direct seed exchange among EU members 2024-2025 - #21 by ThomasPicard
I believe - so may not be entirely right - that raw tasting was enough for that scale and that particular year, even though this may not give a clear indication of texture post cooking. I may end up with some perfect squash for raw consumption, in salad mostly, as members of the culinary breeding network have been advocating for. I hope they will be perfect for a dual use. Overall I bet that raw taste contains the most organoleptic compounds, flavors - which could prove to be wring, but I don’t see why it could be so. It was a really really enjoyable experience, to my surprise. I could target more intentionnally the dual use in the future, as raw food is trending and no particular effort has been made on squash and pumpkins selection for raw use.
I’ve been wondering about this too. We’ve been eating 1-2 squash per week for the last 6 months. I save seeds from those with deep flesh color and good flavor. But because we’re not tasting them simultaneously, there is variation in cure time, our appetites, the weather, etc. So it’s not really an apples to apples comparison and it relies on my memory (never a good idea) of past squashes. The only complete solution I can imagine would be to cut off a small piece of each fruit and taste them all simultaneously, but doing so would make storage more difficult. I imagine this approach is common compromise between storage needs and optimizing selection.
