This Pumpkin Flower Recipe is so easy and delicious, it is not hard to get addicted to it. Just a few simple ingredients thrown together makes a great breakfast, or side dish. Good for any occasion, you and your friends and family will no doubt be waiting for summertime to be coming around again!
Pumpkin Flowers
Pumpkin Flowers are a seasonal treat! To put it simply, pumpkins and other squash varieties, are monoecious plants. Monoecious means that they have male and female flowers on the same plant.
Male flowers are the ones we will be eating. Female flowers of the squash family are the ones which produce fruit so we leave them alone.
Pumpkins grow an abundance of pollen producing male flowers. They grow many male flowers and they grow new ones daily, so harvesting male flowers is not harmful to the production of your vines.
Lets get into identifying the difference between male and female flowers.
The male flowers of pumpkin vines grow on a long stem, and they grow upward. Their growth looks as if they are attempting to get up high to show themselves off to pollinators.
Female flowers grow a shorter, thicker stem, and have a small round fruit at the base of the flower.
Harvesting Pumpkin Flowers
To harvest pumpkin flowers is simple. You want to leave a good length of stem on the flowers so that you have something to hold on to through the process of preparing them and eating them. Also the stem looks great for presentation.
You can pick them with your fingers, by snapping the stem, but I like to use my trusty kitchen shears. Using scissors is so easy and they make such a clean cut.
Just look at that beautiful flower! Can you believe that is our food? How blessed are we?
Here is one of our lovely pumpkin flowers. As you can see, I left a good length of stem on the flower, for reasons I pointed out above.
How To Prep Pumpkin flowers
Pick enough pumpkin flowers to suit you fancy. For this recipe I picked 2 dozen, 24 flowers total. But, you can pick as many as you want to eat!
Harvest your pumpkin flowers and place them in a bowl or a basket.
Wash any noticeable dirt off of your flowers. They may have some on the underside if it has rained recently. Dirt can splash up onto the bottom of your blossoms.
Its no big deal if you have some dirt on there. It washes right off and the blossoms should keep their shape as long as you are gently with them.
How To Cook Pumpkin Flowers
The most common way to prepare pumpkin flowers, especially in the United States, is to fry them in oil.
To begin this extremely simple and elegant Pumpkin Flower Recipe, place your flower into a bowl.
Next comes my favorite part!
A can of some good brew, but any light beer will do the trick. I used Coors Banquet for this recipe.
Make sure it is nice and cold. You could use room temp beer for this recipe but cold beer will hold its carbonation better than the warm beer will.
Do what you really want to do and add that whole can in there!
Pour slow and careful as to keep as much carbonation in the beer as you can. You want the CO2 in the beer to remain intact so that your batter will puff up really good when you fry your pumpkin flowers.
Gently mix it up. You don’t want to stir your batter too much or you will get rid of that lovely carbonation we were talking about.
Mix it up until it is fairly the same throughout. If you have lumps of flour, that is no big deal. Just don’t stir it up too much or it will go flat.
Next begin heating up your oil. Vegetable oil, or any other frying oil will do fine for this recipe.
Heat up your oil until it has a very light smoke. Or toss in a pinch of flower and it should brown within a few seconds.
Next take your flowers and dip them into your batter. Then they will go right into the hot oil!
Cook on each side for about 1 to 2 minutes. It will depend on how hot your oil is, but you are looking for a golden brown color on the whole of the pumpkin flower.
If they are golden brown, you can guarantee that they will be very crunchy when they come out of the pan.
Flip and cook to golden brown on the second side.
After coming out of the pan, place them directly on a plate with a paper towel on it. The paper towel will absorb any extra oil that is on your fried pumpkin flowers.
As soon as they come out of the oil, while they are still hot and have a light coating of residual oil on them, give them a little sprinkle of salt. The salt will bind with the hot oil, and then once the oil is absorbed into the breading, the salt will adhere to the breading.
Look at the golden brown, crunchy goodness! This is just a delightful dish through and through.
With my breakfast, I made some sauteèd onion, peppers, and potatoes.
Pumpkin Flower Recipe
This Pumpkin Flower Recipe is so easy and delicious, it is not hard to get addicted to it. Just a few simple ingredients thrown together makes a great breakfast, or side dish. Good for any occasion, you and your friends and family will no doubt be waiting for summertime to be coming around again!
Ingredients
- 1 1/4 cup of flour
- 1 12oz can of light beer
- Salt to sprinkle (optional)
Instructions
- Pick or purchase pumpkin flowers and wash any dirt off of them.
- Mix your flour and beer together.
- Heat up your oil.
- Batter and fry your pumpkin flowers.
- Sprinkle with salt, and enjoy!!!
Notes
This recipe could be used for any flowers in the squash family.
When placing your pumpkin flowers in the oil, start close to you, and drop them in going away from you. This will cause any hot oil to splash away from you, and not toward you.
Just FYI, If you grow your squash on a trellis, these flowers will not get any dirt on them because they are not close to the ground.
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I like to put a spin on popular dishes and creating new dishes, using foraged foods.
i hunt, fish, raise many different kinds of animals, and have a wide variety of ways of getting my own food.
i very much enjoy plant, tree, mushroom identification and there uses for food, beverage and medicine.
follow along! as i create dishes using all of the things that grow outside your door.
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