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Last night, I set about brutalizing some pumpkins. First, I purchased the pumpkins. Next, I stopped by the dollar store to get a little kit to carve them up. The kit cost a mere 3% of what my three pumpkins had run me, so I was grateful for a deal. When I got home, I got to work, sawing into the top of one of my big squashes (for carving) and completely ripping apart another (for baking). Without thinking about it, I used a giant kitchen knife to get this done. I should have stuck with that approach because soon enough, the stupid little scoop that came in the kit had broken deep inside the pumpkin I wanted to carve and I couldn’t see well enough into the dark, guts-filled cavern to remove all the bits. That was tragic, since I like to bake with those bits, too, and it meant I spent way too long last night straining and rummaging through stringy guts to make sure no one who consumed my cookies was inadvertently eating slivers of plastic scoop.
Do not get a little kit. Do this instead.
Option one: a big spoon
After my little scoop broke apart, I scrambled to find something that could help me continue on my quest to de-gut my pumpkin. I found a big metal spoon and got to work—and it went way smoother than it had been with the plastic scoop. Overall, I recommend a metal spoon for getting the stringy bits, seeds, and inner gunk out of a pumpkin with ease. This works for carving and baking, as I like to use the stringy guts in the puree I make out of pumpkin rinds, utilizing even the discarded elements of my carving pumpkins.
Option two: a bigger kit
As a dedicated dollar-store patron, I didn’t realize you could get big kits, too, but Lifehacker senior health editor Beth Skwarecki educated me this morning, suggesting that anyone who wants to use a kit should get one like this. She says the bigger scoop is sturdier and more reliable, and the larger knives work well, too. She called them “game changers.” Plus, they’re relatively inexpensive: The kit linked above is just $4.97, so it’s not that much more costly than using the $1 mini-kit.
Option three: a mixer
Just like you can use power tools to carve your pumpkins, you can use them to scoop out your pumpkin guts. Attach a paint mixer or even a kitchen mixer to a drill, stick that deep in the pumpkin, and let the electric motor do all the work. Below is a video from Ace Hardware showing how that’s done.
from Lifehacker https://ift.tt/m8kuiBg
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