Warning over eating pumpkin flesh after carving it
It's October, and anyone who loves this time of year knows exactly what means.
Yes, it is once again spooky season, our modern iteration of Samhain (pronounced sow-wayn) where the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is at its thinnest: Halloween.
That means it's time to grab the largest pumpkin you can find and carve a spooky design into the front of it.
Jack-o-Lanterns are believed to have originated as a Samhain practice in Ireland and Scotland, where people would carve designs into turnips or mangelwurzels (yes, that's a real vegetable) as a way to ward off evil spirits.
Advert
The name Jack-o-Lantern originates as the mysterious lights which would appear over peat bogs at night, similar to Will-o-the-wisps, which you must never follow.
While carving a pumpkin is a fun tradition at Halloween, cooking the pumpkin after carving it may see you visited by something other than evil spirits.
Can you carve a pumpkin and eat it later?
It's a sensible enough question given that you can eat pumpkins right away. That all changes when you've carved into it, though.
The answer is bacteria. A pumpkin's skin acts as a protective barrier, but if you cut through that to carve it you expose the nutritious flesh inside to all sorts of bugs that can then start to grow there.
A cut pumpkin should be refrigerated, but putting a candle inside a Jack-o-Lantern - as is common practice - obviously has quite the opposite effect.
Jonathan Deutsch, a food and hospitality management professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, told the Huffington Post: “Keep in mind that vegetables, including pumpkins, once cut, are considered a TCS - time and temperature controlled for safety - food.
“That means that it should be cooked immediately or kept refrigerated and cooked within a couple of days for optimal food safety.”
How can you decorate a pumpkin and still eat it?
You can still put designs onto a pumpkin and eat it, as long as you don't break the skin in doing so.
This might include using stickers on the outside.
Alternatively, you could mix up some edible paint from sugar, cornstarch, water, and food colouring and decorate that way.
You won't get that classic spooky glow this way, but you will cut down on food waste.
Are carving pumpkins good for eating?
The short answer is yes - and no.
Carving pumpkins are different from the ones which are grown for food, as well as the types of squashes you might have.
While the eating ones are a lot sweeter and more tender, carving pumpkins can be tougher, stringier, and blander, meaning you may have to work a bit harder with your recipe - adding more spices, seasonings and such.
You could also save the seeds that you scoop out, as these can be toasted off and mixed with salt and whatever flavourings you like for a tasty snack.
If you have one, there is always the compost heap as well.
Kit Roberts