Like carrots, sweet potatoes, and other orange-colored foods, pumpkin is rich is carotenoids. Carotenoids help prevent macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness in old age. Carotenoids also help prevent cancer and improve skin health. The study, “β-Carotene and other carotenoids in protection from sunlight,” notes: “An optimal supply of antioxidant micronutrients in the skin increases basal dermal defense against UV irradiation, supports longer-term protection, and contributes to maintenance of skin health and appearance.”
Pumpkins may also improve athletic performance by decreasing fatigue. See, “Pumpkin (Cucurbita moschata) Fruit Extract Improves Physical Fatigue and Exercise Performance in Mice.”
Check out our Juicing Buyer’s Guide.
You can juice pumpkins if you follow these steps:
- Buy a “sweet pumpkin” that is meant to eat or make pie with. These are smaller pumpkins.
- Wash the outside of the pumpkin thoroughly. That thing has been sitting outside for who knows how long.
- Using a vegetable peeler (like this one) or knife, peel the hard skin of the pumpkin. The exterior of the pumpkin is very hard and might clog some juicers.
- Cut the pumpkin in quarters.
- Remove the pulp and seeds. (Pumpkin seeds are rich in magnesium and other minerals. Save those seeds. Bake them later.)
- Cut the de-seeded pumpkin into small segments.
Now you’re reading to juice. Simply throw the pumpkin into your juicer and juice as you normally would. (Note: If you peel a pumpkin, your juicer will handle it nicely. If you do not peel the pumpkin, your juicer might have some challenges. Check your owner’s manual and use some common sense.)
Check out our Juicing Recipes.
Here are some of my favorite recipes:
Pumpkin Pie Juice
- 1 small pumpkin
- 3 carrots
- 1 apple (or pear)
- 1/2″ ginger
- stir in your favorie spices such as cinnamon, cloves, allspice and nutmeg.
- Optional: I add this delicious egg white protein to turn my juice into a vanilla treat.
Enjoy!
I’ve been wondering about this! I’ll try making it tomorrow.
Okay, reporting back, Pumpkin Juice in hand…
1.) I made the recipe you listed, with some minor variations. I skipped the ginger because I don’t like the taste of it. (I’ve seen you use it in a lot of recipes, is it for health reasons or because you like the tang it gives to juice?) I don’t have any egg white protein, so I mixed in some Optimum Nutrition Vanilla Casein instead. Threw some cinnamon on top.
2.) It’s GOOD. This is by far the best-tasting juice I’ve made. I don’t think it’s just the vanilla or cinnamon either; there’s just something about the taste of pumpkin that’s wonderful. But…
3.) It was a pain in the butt to make. Pumpkins are hard little things to cut. I found I had better luck sawing around the edges with the smaller knife than I did trying to slice through it with my bigger one, but if you had a large, serrated knife that would definitely be the thing to use.
4.) I couldn’t peel the skin. I don’t have a peeler and the knife just wasn’t cutting it. My Brevel didn’t even remotely care. It tore through it just as fast as it did anything else. That thing is a monster.
5.) The yield on pumpkin is better than I would have expected. I got about 32 ounces out of the recipe you listed, and the vast majority of that was pumpkin.
So pain to make, but worth it for a once in a while treat. Wouldn’t be making it part of my daily juice, but I’ll be rotating it in a few times, especially as we get nearer to the end of fall.
Great comments.
I use ginger because it’s delicious. It’s also very healthy. But if you don’t like it, it’s not a huge loss.
As I was making my own juice yesterday, I was reminded that my kitchen is equipped with a Shun chef knife. My miniature samurai sword handles the pumpkin well. A meat cleaver comes in handy, too.
The peeling seems to be the biggest problem – I know this because I cook with pumpkin a fair bit. Pain in the butt, and no mistake, along the order of butternut squash or jicama. It’s easy to remove (with a spoon) once roasted, and the flavor of even partly roasted pumpkin is outstanding; but how much of the goodforyouness would be clobbered by doing so?
Raw pumpkin juice isn’t required. I mixed canned, cooked pumpkin into my protein shakes. Pretty delicious and loaded with phytonutrients, polyphenols, carotenoids, and other phytochemicals that improve skin tone and texture and fight cancer cells.