What to Do With Pumpkin Guts: The Bowl Nobody Plans For

There is a bowl on the kitchen table right now that nobody planned for. It came out of a Long Island Cheese that had been sitting on the porch step since Saturday, and it is full of wet orange strings and seeds and that faint green smell raw squash has. Every year I figure out what to do with pumpkin guts a little differently, and every year I end up standing over this same bowl for a minute first, wondering why the recipe never mentions it.

The pie gets all the attention. The puree gets a whole guide of its own. The pulp gets a paper towel and the trash can, usually, and that has always seemed like the wrong ending for the part of the fruit that was doing the actual work.

What pumpkin guts actually are

The stringy mass is the tissue that fed every seed in there. It is where the sugar moved through, which is why it smells sweet and why it goes slimy so fast. It is also almost entirely water, and that matters for every use below. You are not working with a dense ingredient. You are working with something wet and mild that wants to be either simmered, buried, or eaten today.

Once you know that, the choices get simple. Nothing about pumpkin guts rewards saving them for the weekend.

Sort the seeds out first

Before anything else, run your fingers through the bowl and pull the seeds. This takes five minutes and it decides everything after.

Plump, pale, full seeds are worth keeping. Flat ones never got pollinated and will not grow. Then the real question: eat them or plant them. If the pumpkin came from a hybrid, the seeds will grow into something, but not into what you just cut open, so those go in the roasting pan. If it came from an open-pollinated variety you grew yourself, and it was not sitting next to three other squash all summer, those are worth drying. Our guide to saving pumpkin and squash seeds covers the washing and drying part, and the roasted seed recipes cover the other half of the bowl.

Whichever way they go, get them out of the pulp before the pulp goes anywhere. Wet strings cling, and seeds left in a warm pile start to sprout or sour within a day or two.

The best thing to do with pumpkin guts is simmer them

This is the use I keep coming back to, and I want to be honest about it. Pumpkin pulp does not make a rich broth on its own. It makes a thin, faintly sweet liquid that tastes like the vegetable it came from, which is lovely and also not dinner.

What it does beautifully is start a stock. I put the pulp in a pot with an onion cut in half, a carrot, a celery rib, a bay leaf and whatever herb stems are going soft in the refrigerator door. Cover it with water, bring it to a simmer, and leave it alone for about forty minutes. Longer than that and the sweetness turns a little flat. Strain it through a sieve, press gently on the solids, and you have two or three cups of golden stock that turns a rice pilaf or a white bean soup into something that tastes like October.

It freezes well in jars or in a muffin tin if you want small portions. I label it, because in February a frozen block of anything orange is a mystery.

What the flock and the pile get

The solids that come out of the sieve go two places. Some goes to the chickens, who treat a bowl of warm strained pumpkin pulp as a genuine event, and the rest goes on the compost pile. I will save the longer conversation about seeds and the flock for another morning, because there are some old claims floating around about that which deserve their own careful post.

The pile is where I am least careful and most rewarded. Pumpkin pulp is wet and high in nitrogen, so it wants dry material with it. I bury it under a good armful of shredded leaves or straw rather than leaving it sitting on top, which keeps the flies out of it and keeps the neighborhood raccoons from deciding our pile is a buffet. Our guide to composting pumpkin vines and end-of-season cleanup walks through the balance if your pile has been sulking.

Buried properly, it disappears fast. Six weeks in fall weather and it is gone into the kind of dark, living soil that makes next year easier.

The volunteers you did not plan

Every stray seed that rides into the compost on a piece of pulp is a coin flip you will find out about in June. We get volunteers every single year, sprawling out of the pile with leaves the size of dinner plates, and most of them turn out to be something unrepeatable that crossed in the patch last August.

I let a couple of them run. Not because they will be good, though sometimes they are, but because a vine that planted itself is a reminder that this whole thing works without me. Seeds want to grow. The pile wants to feed them. All I really did was carry a bowl outside.

Nothing here leaves the place

So that is what to do with pumpkin guts, and none of it is complicated. Pull the seeds, simmer the pulp for a few cups of stock, feed the flock a little, and bury the rest where it turns back into soil. Four small acts, one bowl, and nothing at all in the trash.

It is a small thing to be pleased about on a Wednesday morning. But I like knowing that the whole fruit stays here, that the part I cannot eat goes into the ground that grows the next one, and that some seed I never meant to plant is already lying in the dark out there waiting for spring.

If you would rather grow the kind of pumpkin whose seeds are worth saving, the heirloom open-pollinated varieties are where to start. They come back true, year after year, from a bowl just like this one.

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From the patch in Newton, Kansas.