Home Dried Pumpkin Crackers

My grandson would eat pumpkin bread and pumpkin pie every day of his life if he had his d’ruthers, so here’s the recipe for the pumpkin crackers I’m making now in my newfound food drying frenzy. From a crop of mini-pumpkins that took over three whole terraces of the garden (I only planted 4!) before I started cutting them back so I could get to the compost bin and tomatoes.

3 cups pumpkin puree
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup ground mixed acorns and pumpkin seeds
* [can add flax and/or sesame seeds as desired, whole, toasted]
1 tbsp. ground cinnamon
1 tbsp. cornstarch
1 tsp. ground ginger
1 tsp. ground nutmeg

Now, 3 cups of pumpkin puree is about what you get out of a single mini pumpkin. If you’re growing giants, good luck (you can eat pumpkin bread and pie every day for a year from just one of those). Cut it in half, scoop out the seeds into a colander, quarter and put into an oven roasting pan with about an inch of water. Bake at 350º until soft. While the oven’s on, roast the cleaned and rinsed seeds on a baking sheet, stirring every 5 minutes to roast evenly (don’t burn). The pumpkin will be done in about 30-40 minutes.

Unless you already have acorn flour, you’ll have to make that too. First shell the acorns and half them on their natural split line, use only those with cream-colored meat. Put into a pot of boiling water for 10 minutes then drain. Refill the pot and do it again until the boiling water is no longer dark with tannin. Some oaks need only one leaching, some need two or three. When the water is clear, drain the acorns well and arrange on a baking sheet, single layer. Roast at 300º (stirring occasionally) until well dried. Some like to air dry the acorns and then blender-ize into a chunky, oily-but spreadable paste. Then dry that, break into pieces, and grind again to get a finer flour.

Now, if you really want to do things the old way (and if so, you’d be using a potato masher instead of a blender, and grinding the seeds and acorns on a rock by hand), you can leach acorns in a flowing creek or stream. Once they’ve been shelled and halved, put into a burlap or mesh bag and weight the bag in the flowing water for a few days, then dry in the sun. Acorns were once a staple food crop for people as well as squirrels and such, they are very nutritious. You just have to get the bitterness out, and that’s what the leaching is for. You can mix acorn flour – which is “mealy” and somewhat oily, with fine-ground dry cattail heads to make a tasty flatbread. So if you’re out camping and ‘roughing it’ just to see if you can, there’s a good hunter-gatherer project right there! Acorn flour is also a good thickener for soups and stews (excellent, I hear, in venison stew), or mixed with oatmeal and other rolled grains for breakfast gruel.

Anyway, on with the pumpkin cracker recipe…

Put the dry roasted pumpkin seeds in the blender and grind into powder. Add the acorns and grind as fine as possible. Either or both may have high oil content, so you can freeze them in sealed containers first to get it as powdery as possible. Add this powder and the syrup, sugar, cornstarch and spices to the pumpkin puree in a saucepan and bring to a slow boil on medium heat, stirring constantly. The mixture will be thick, so when it starts bubbling from underneath cook another 3 minutes still stirring, remove from heat and let cool.

Drop by spoon onto oiled sheets, spread to 1/4 inch thickness with the back of the spoon to make separate round chips. You’ll want them to be about 2.5-3 inches in diameter, as they shrink significantly when dry. Dry at 140-150º. When firm enough to flip, do so and dry until crisp.

Store in airtight jars or zip-lock bags. If they aren’t still crisp when you want to eat some, spread them on a cookie sheet and warm them at 300º for a few minutes until they crisp up. Scrumptious with cold apple or pear butter for a dip. Perfect for fall get-togethers, include a handful of chips with a serving of apple butter or fruit leather in school lunches!

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