Did you know that nothing is thrown away from the pumpkin, and that you can also eat the peel? Here are some suggestions to enjoy it at its best
Did you know that nothing is thrown away from the pumpkin, and that you can also eat the peel? Here are some suggestions to enjoy it at its best
It is the undisputed symbol of the autumn season and, in particular, of the month of October that we are experiencing, because it is the queen of the Halloween party: it is the pumpkin! Belonging to the Cucurbitaceae family, the pumpkin it is a very versatile vegetable, used in a thousand recipes (sweet and savory) for its sweet and delicate flavor, contains very few calories (100 grams of yellow squash bring only 18 calories) and brings many benefits to our health: pumpkin, in fact, is rich in vitamins, fibers, antioxidants and beta-carotene, a component that can be used by the body for the formation of vitamin A.
As we said, we can use this vegetable for countless recipes (HERE you can find some ideas on how to cook it), but did you know that you can also eat the skin of the pumpkin? That's right: the pumpkin it is a fully edible vegetable, in fact, the seeds are also eaten, which are excellent as a hunger-breaker snack (here are some suggestions for preserving and cooking them in the best way). For a truly sustainable and zero-waste cuisine, let's see how can we “recycle” the peels of the vegetable and turn them into delicious dishes.
(Also read: Don't throw pumpkin seeds away! How to cook them in the air fryer to make them tastier)
Before proceeding with cooking the skins, let's make sure that the pumpkin comes from organic farming and that it has not undergone treatments with chemical pesticides. Being harder and more compact than the pulp, pumpkin skins require longer cooking times: to overcome this drawback, we can choose to consume pumpkins with a thinner and softer skin (for example Okkaido or Delica), or boil for a few minutes. the skins in water before proceeding with the actual cooking.
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We can consume the skins together with the pulp and use them to enrich risottos, soups or sweet jams with flavor - or we can use them alone to prepare some tasty chips: after having washed them carefully and cut them into strips, just boil them in water for half an hour and then put them back in the oven at 200 ° C for about twenty minutes, sprinkled with oil, salt and your favorite aromatic herbs (we recommend rosemary and laurel).
We will have recycled a "waste" in a creative way and created a crunchy side dish that will also appeal to children! To make the chips even more delicious, then, we can fry them in hot oil after having washed and dried them well with absorbent paper (in this case it is not necessary to pass them into boiling water): after a few minutes our skins will be ready, at that point we just have to drain them well from the excess oil and salt them to taste.
Another good idea (perhaps to enrich the Halloween table) is that of use the peel of the vegetable as a "container" for a risotto based on pumpkin: in this case we just need to empty the pumpkin of its pulp (which we will use to make the risotto) and cook it in the oven for an hour. Also in this case, the peel can be safely eaten.
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We also recommend:
- Don't throw away the broccoli stems, use them in this anti-waste pesto
- Anti-waste savory pie with psyllium and beetroot leaves, without eggs
- Pumpkin: do you know the 3-minute trick to cut it quickly and effortlessly?
