stlbites.com – st. louis food blog of bill burge

Dehydrated Pumpkin Puree

Sep 14, 2007 farmers' markets, general food

I have the ability to see what search terms people use to run across my site, and I have to say, the one that’s most shocking to me, is the number of people that have come here off the search “dehydrated pumpkin”.

One of the first posts I ever made when I first made a run at this blog thing was in regards to my making homemade pumpkin puree. We were swimming in puree as I completely overshot my need so I started making all kinds of pumpkin stuff.

There was a pumpkin sage risotto that turned out really nice. Two kinds of pumpkin cornbread which admittedly I wasn’t completely sold on. Of course there was pumpkin pie and pumpkin bread pudding, my own recipe, was a huge hit at Thanksgiving.

Lastly there were pumpkin cookies . People seemed to love the cookies too. They had a great flavor and a super sweet icing that was super simple, but delicious. They were, however, kind of cakey and muffin-like. I’d hoped I could find a way to get a crispier cookie, and that’s when I shot Alex and Aki at Ideas In Food an email about whether they’d ever dehydrated purees and pumpkin puree specifically. They hadn’t, but thought it was a good idea giving me a couple tips based upon their experience.

Well I’m sorry to say that while I thought that was a still a great idea over the last year I was missing the much dehydrator to make that happen. That is, until three weeks ago.

Three weeks ago there were juliet tomatoes at the farmers market. They’re a large grap tomato and are excellent for sun drying. As it’s too humid in Missouri, however, you have to use a dehydrator. So I bought 6 pounds of tomatoes as the excuse to finally get one.

I picked up this hot little number and got to work on a nice bag of dehydrated tomatoes for the winter; my first personal foray into stocking my pantry with a little bit of summer to pull out mid winter.

So, anyway, if you’re one of those “dehydrated pumpkin” searchers, stay tuned, an attempt at dehydrated pumpkin is on the way.

…oh, and the juliets awaiting their shriveling…