Acetio | Blogma

When I was a kid we would scoop the pumpkins a few days before Halloween and save the seeds and wash them and toast them in the oven and put salt on them and eat them. And they always tasted like pencil shavings. They were too difficult to shell individually so we ate them with the shells, and the shells were woody and tough and inedible.

So I was excited when I saw this recipe that had a different approach, involving boiling the seeds in salt water before baking.

We had recently made soft pretzels, and found that the secret to good soft pretzels, in addition to beating the hell out of the dough, is to boil the formed pretzels in baking soda and water. So I was ready to accept the idea that boiling is the solution to many of life's problems.

So we followed the recipe, boiling the seeds in brine and oiling them generously. And they were good. Very good, in fact. The shells were so brittle and thin that they were of little more consequence than the papery covering on peanuts. The one problem is that I baked them for a full 20 minutes, and they were a bit over-done. Next time I'll try 15 and check on them.

One note is that we used the seeds from a "sugar" pumpkin, the flesh of which is intended for pies, as opposed to a jack-o-lantern pumpkin, which is much softer. I don't know whether the seeds different in the two types of pumpkin, but they might.