Pumpkin Carving in Montana: I Tried These 3 Hacks
My family typically carves our pumpkins a week or so before Halloween. This year, time got away from us. It's Halloween Eve and we have four pumpkins to carve. The internet is full of pumpkin carving "hacks", some seem like a good idea, others... not so much.
Today, I tried three of these allegedly time-saving pumpkin carving tips: using a jigsaw to cut out the pumpkins, using a hand blender to free the insides of the pumpkin, and cutting the hole on the bottom, instead of the top. Let's see how it went.
Read More: See 20 of the Spookiest Halloween Houses in Billings
Step one: find my jigsaw.
I'm not much of a carpenter, but carving a pumpkin with a jigsaw seems like a time-saving concept.
We're also going to need a kitchen mixer.
Supposedly, after you cut the hole in your pumpkin, you can use a mixer to scrape out the "guts" of the pumpkin. It's allegedly easier than scraping with a spoon.
Oop! Should have drawn it out first.
On pumpkin #1 I made the first cut freestyle. Note to self: draw out your lines first. However! The jigsaw cut through the pumpkin like butter. It almost got away from me. Having a helper hold the pumpkin is a good idea.
Next, the mixer!
I jammed the mixer into the pumpkin cavity, cranked the speed to high, and went to town. I ran it for about 30 seconds, moving the mixer all over, trying to scrape all the stringy junk and seeds off.
This technique seemed quite efficient on the smaller of our four pumpkins, as the mixer blades only reach so far into the pumpkin. On a larger pumpkin, you can't reach the bottom.
Using the mixer kind of turned everything into the consistency of baby food and made extracting the seeds a tiny bit easier.
Save those seeds.
If you aren't saving your seeds for roasting (our favorite part!), carving a pumpkin takes a lot less time. With the mixer method, you can blend everything up and dump it out in a pile. I followed up on some hard-reach areas with a bent spoon.
Ew! The gut pile.
I'm not much of a hunter, so this is probably the only gut pile I'll run into this fall.
Upside-down style?
This common "hack" says that if you cut a pumpkin hole from the bottom, instead of the top, all of the guts come out much easier.
DEBUNKED. Cleaning the seeds/stringy stuff/slime from the bottom side hole took approximately the same amount of time for me as it did working from the traditional top/stem hole.
The jigsaw worked well on simple designs.
By the second pumpkin, I found the jigsaw easy to control and follow the lines of the design. It feels far safer than stabbing around with a knife. Details work is a challenge, however. You can see I inadvertently chopped off a couple of teeth on the pumpkin above, mainly because I wasn't paying attention.
This little guy took maybe two minutes to cut with the jigsaw.
We're the hacks useful?
In my experience, the jigsaw made carving simple designs a snap. On the 4th pumpkin, I went back to a spoon, instead of the mixer and honestly, it seemed to take about the same amount of time to clean out. As for the upside-down hole, I noticed no difference in ease of cleaning.
Note: wipe down your mixer and jigsaw promptly when you're done. Sticky pumpkin guts dry quickly and are surprisingly stubborn to remove.
LOOK: These Are The Black Eyed Kids From The PBS Documentary
Gallery Credit: Rudy Fernandez
The Cutest Dang Dog Costumes in Montana
Gallery Credit: Michael Foth