Home Oven Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

Recipe: Home Oven Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

Home Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

As I was preparing the butternut squash for my spicy soup recipe at the weekend, I wondered if the squash seeds I was about to bin could be roasted at home.  Turns out they so can, geez, who knew?  Apparently thousands of American bloggers, that’s who.  So, I started the long, sometimes painful trawl through scores of blog methods for roasting pumpkin seeds. 

Wow, are there multiple ways of doing this.  Some call for soaking for days in the fridge, changing the water, boiling in salted water first, shelling, not shelling, short roasting at high temps, long roasting at low temps, I don’t think I have ever seen such a variety of ways of making one thing.  The upshot was what I was looking for had to be quick, not hard and not fiddly, and I found this method below in a comment on another comment buried deep in a very obscure blog.  You don’t have to do the research people, because we do it for you here at Hampshirecook…

Ingredients:

• Whatever comes out of your pumpkin/squash.  I used a butternut squash and got a couple of ounces, around 50g of seeds.
• Olive Oil
• Celery Salt

Method:

Heat oven to 200 degrees.  Separate the seeds from the gloopy, stringy orangey stuff by placing whatever you scooped out the pumpkin cavity in a bowl of water and whooshing around with your hand.  The seeds float away from the stringy stuff, which sinks to the bottom. This is by far the fiddliest bit, but only takes a couple of minutes.  Next, put seeds in a colander, rinse under the tap.  Then put the seeds in another bowl of clean water with a couple of teaspoons of salt in.  Leave for 10 mins.  Drain this, pat seeds dry (well dryish, I wasn’t too particular about this) with kitchen towel.

Next, in a small roasting pan, coat the seeds with olive oil and sprinkle generously with celery salt.  I probably was a bit heavy-handed with the old olive oil, I would maybe think next time a dessertspoon would be enough.  Place in oven.  Every couple of minutes, whoosh round with a spatula.  After about 15 minutes they start exploding in your oven.  They are, at that point, done.  Take out, but beware of popping pumpkin seeds and potential eye disasters…

If they make it into a bowl before you have wolfed down the lot, I will be very surprised.  Ours did not last 10 minutes, I had to grab the bowl from myself to take the photo, whereupon my hub said “Had enough of these, OK if I just finish them off?”  and promptly did.  They were absolutely gorgeous.  And we are not even very fond of the shop bought kind, it’s like, something we never buy.