Annam Naturals
Sustainable Kitchen & Food

Pumpkin season without waste: seeds, skin and stock

Most of a pumpkin is edible, including parts many people throw away. Here is how to use the whole thing.

2 October 2026 · 6 min read

A sliced pumpkin on a wooden surface

Chetanya Goel · Founder & Editor

Chetanya started Annam Naturals after two years of keeping a household waste diary. Chetanya writes about the boring, repeatable habits that hold up in a real week.

Halloween has made carving pumpkins popular well beyond its home countries, and in India the red pumpkin, kaddu, is a staple of sabzis, halwa and sambar all year. Whether it ends up as a lantern or a curry, much of the pumpkin often goes in the bin. It does not need to.

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The seeds

Pumpkin seeds are nutritious and delicious roasted.

  • Separate the seeds from the stringy pulp and rinse them
  • Dry them on a cloth
  • Toss with a little oil and salt, or with chaat masala, chilli or cumin
  • Roast in a moderate oven or a heavy pan, stirring, until golden and crisp

Keep them in an airtight jar for snacking, or sprinkle them on salads and raita.

The skin

The skin of many pumpkin varieties is edible once cooked, especially thinner-skinned ones. In Bengali cooking, pumpkin peel is fried with poppy seeds or made into a crisp chorchori. Wash it well, slice it thin and cook it with spices. Very tough skin can go into stock instead.

The stringy pulp

The fibrous centre around the seeds has a lot of flavour. Simmer it with vegetable trimmings for stock, or blend it into soup.

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The flesh

Use it in sabzi, sambar, soup, halwa or a roasted salad. If you carved a pumpkin for decoration, cook the scooped-out flesh the same day; carved pumpkins left out for days are not safe to eat.

Leftover pumpkin

Cooked pumpkin puree freezes well in portions and can be added to dal, pancakes or bread dough.

What goes to compost

Only the stem and anything mouldy. A pumpkin lantern after Halloween can be chopped and composted; cutting it into small pieces helps it break down faster.

A simple stock

Simmer pumpkin pulp, peel scraps, onion skins, a few garlic cloves and a bay leaf in water for forty-five minutes. Strain and use it for soups, rice or dal. It turns what would have been waste into the base of another meal.

For more of this kind of testing, the sustainable kitchen & food hub collects everything we've tried in that area.

Frequently asked

Do I need to buy anything to get started?

No. Every method here begins with what is already in your cupboards. We only recommend a purchase when something has genuinely worn out, and we say what it should cost.

How do you test the things you write about?

Minimum four weeks of ordinary household use, with notes. For anything involving energy or money we use a plug-in meter and record the readings before and after.

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What if a method doesn't work in my home?

Write to us. A surprising amount of our best material comes from readers explaining why something failed in a flat, a shared house or a very cold winter.

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