It is hard to say no to a child. It is even harder to do so if the child in question is inside you. Every child (and adult) likes Harry Potter and is dreaming of living in a world of wizards and muggles. Therefore it is no wonder that beside asking to wave a wand and do magic one would also like to taste some of the delicious magic treats. Jumping chocolate frogs are out of the reach – at least for now – but there are some things than are far easier to prepare. Let’s start with a drink – and pumpkin juice might just be the thing.
You can already get it a bunch of recipes on the internet – but they mostly use apple juice as a base, which definitely does not fall into my concept of straight cooking and finally nothing beats preparing one’s own creation.
As said it stands to reason that pumpkin juice should be made – at least in part – from pumpkins. This is fairly easily done by taking the pumpkin, removing the seeds and the skin, blending the rest and filter out the juice from the puree with a clean cloth. To slightly improve the taste and still remain true to the pumpkin origins I also used melons, which for me technically count as pumpkins, since they are cousins. Both belong to the family Cucurbitaceae, with pumpkin belonging to Cucurbita genera, while melon belongs to Cucumis genera. The procedure to make melon juice is the same as with the pumpkin – remove the seeds and the skin, blend and filter.
So the base is done – now for the final touches which include taste optimization. After considering several options – from purely adult pumpkin juice tasting like cold pumpkin soup to sweet juice which would appeal to children, I decided for an option leaning more to the children side, since this goes well with the concept of pumpkin juice depicted in Harry Potter books.
Vanilla definitely goes well with melon, with many different recipes combining both floating around on the internet, therefore this is a natural addition. In order to keep the recipe simple and to keep the tastes clean, I decided only to add something sweet to make it tastier and bind all the tastes together. After testing three different sweeteners – regular sugar, brown sugar and honey – brown sugar was selected. Regular sugar enhanced the melon taste too much, completely obscuring the pumpkin taste. The difference in tastes was not so big between brown sugar and honey, with brown providing more rounded taste, while honey was enhancing the honey taste of the melon, making the whole juice, well, too much honey like.
MAKING THE PUMPKIN JUICE
Ingredients and amounts:
- 500 g cleaned and diced pumpkin
- 500 g cleaned and diced melon
- stalk of bourbon vanilla
- 30 g brown sugar
Clean the pumpkin, remove the seeds and the shell, cut in small pieces. Put the pumpkin pieces together with about 150 ml of water in a pan, bring to boil and boil it for around 5 minutes. Allow to cool down – or boil a bit longer if time is of an essence. Pumpkin should be nice and soft – now blend it to a pulp.
Filter the pulp through a clean cloth to get pumpkin juice without the solid particles. You should have around ½ liter of the juice, if you used 500 g of cleaned pumpkin.
For the melon use the same steps, save for the cooking step. Just remove the seeds and the shell, cut, put in a bowl, add water, blend and you have a nice melon pulp. Filter through a cloth and there should be around ½ liter of the juice, if you used 500 g of cleaned melon.
Mix the two juices, add the sugar and stir until the sugar dissolves. Put the juice in a bottle and add the vanilla stalk. Store the bottle overnight in the fridge so that the tastes mix and the vanilla flavor can fully develop. You can take stalk out once the vanilla taste is to you liking. The pumpkin juice should be drunk fresh and can be stored in the fridge for around 3 days. When stored it can separate into layers or get a little thicker – just shake well before pouring it.
Image credit: Amazing food
