DIY roast pumpkin seeds?

[Nicos]

Thanks peeps .
I'll give it a go with the one I have left, and will keep my fingers crossed...
I'd rather grow a pumpkin for flavour than seeds though, so I might give up on the idea.
Certainly worth a try !

[Jeremy424]

I don't think there are any particular varieties that are favoured more than others. The important point is to choose seeds that look like they could be roasted. I tend to roast winter squash seeds from the Maxima species like Crown Prince, Red Kuri, Queensland blue. Sometimes a small amount of the seeds can be flat and useless. Sometimes the husk is thinner and edible after roasting and other times not so much. I think it just depends on how well the 'pumpkin' has grown.

My advice would be not to grow them just for seeds Grow them for the delicious flesh and treat the seeds as a bonus. You don't need to wash them either. Remove them from the stringy pulp and put them in a colander with a small amount of salt and mix up. Lay them on a tray lined with grease-proof paper and leave in a cool room for a few days until they are dry and you can separate them.

My preferred and energy efficient method of roasting them is as follows. If I happen to have something like a chicken in the oven and it's ready to come out them I remove it and I turn off the oven and put the seeds in. They'll roast in the residual heat of the oven and you can open the door once or twice just to give them a stir (bearing in mind you lose heat every time the door opens). It's hard to give you specific times and temps, but it isn't more than about 12 mins if my oven has been on at 190 c. It also depends on how thick the husk of the seed is so just experiment.

The reason I don't wash them is because that gunky stuff that hardens on the seed creates the most amazing umami flavour when roasted. However, you can rub it off the seed when roasted if you don't like it or have put too much salt on (as I did in the early stages of my experimenting).

If the seed coat is too hard to eat you put the whole seed vertically between your two front teeth and put just enough pressure around the pointed tip to fracture the hull so it splits in two in your mouth. Let the seed fall into your mouth and discard the hull. If the hull is soft then eat the whole thing. Enjoy.