C. argyrosperma Pepita landrace

[oxbowfarm]

Lately I've been on a mission to learn more about Mexican/Central American cuisine, particularly as I'm trying to incorporate my flint and flour corn more regularly into our diet, tortillas, gorditas, arepas, posole, atole, pinole, etc. I've been watching lots of Mexican Youtube videos, especially Oaxacan videos.

There's a frequent use of pepitas in lots of these recipes, and a lot of time I noticed they are big narrow pepitas with hulls still on. They often get seared on a comal and then pured into mole and pipian sauces.

From what I can tell, a lot of these pepitas are C. argyrosperma, and are purpose grown just for the seeds.

I've grown cushaw squash a couple of times. Tennesee Sweet Potato and Green Striped. While both grew here and were relatively trouble-free but I can't say much for the eating quality of the squash itself. Whomever named Tennessee Sweet Potato either was given to extreme hyperbole or only ate bland, coarse textured, watery sweet potatoes. From just a cursory glance around the web, including the descriptions on here of Mospermia, argyrospermas and their crosses are generally bland as hell.

My thought was to try and develop a New York version of these big seeded pepita argyrospermas. I've got a packet of Joseph's Landrace Mixta (argyrosperma) so that should be plenty short season enough, and I bought two packets from NS/S of Mexican pepita types to cross into them. They may be too long season to make on their own, its a long way to Veracruz from NY, but I can probably get pollen off them at least.

[steev]

That Veracruz Pepita really is uncommonly narrow; interesting.

So the hulls are eaten; prolly just good fiber; people tend to worry too much about getting food that is very "refined", although that seems implicated in colon cancer; we need to get back to when "roughage" was seen as good for us.

[oxbowfarm]

In most of the vidoes/recipes where they are using them they dry roast them on a comal, then they blend/puree them with stock into a sauce. Mostly in various mole or pipian sauce recipes. Sometimes they run it though a mesh collander which I imagine removes a lot of the fiber. You can see these long pepitas in this video, at about 0:35, they look like she pre-roasted them before she started taking footage.

[walt]

About 20 years ago, I tried some of the seed-type squash from NS/S.  Here in central Kansas, they grew well but not good yield.  Never grew them again.  Thought about crossing them with shorter season squash but I was doing too much else.  Glad to see someone else trying it.