Adding Pumpkin to Your Food Truck Menu

With Halloween and Thanksgiving right around the corner, we felt it would be a good time to include some tips on adding pumpkin to your food truck menu. It is easy to fall into a standard menu, serving the same foods year-after-year. Here are some tips to help vendors adding pumkin to your food truck menu.

Adding Pumpkin to Your Food Truck Menu

Take advantage of the fall change and bring fall to your menu with new interesting flavors and offers, you’ll be surprised how exciting the change of season can really be.

Choose smaller pumpkins for cooking. Sugar pumpkins are usually labeled by the market for cooking purposes as opposed to those used for decorating or Jack-o’-lanterns.
Pumpkin seeds, known as pepitas, are often roasted and added as a less expensive alternative to pine nuts in recipes.
Pumpkin seeds can be toasted on a cookie sheet in the oven at a low temperature. Be sure to stir them often and watch for burning. Some prefer to soak the seeds in salt water before toasting.
Another by-product, pumpkin seed oil, is normally mixed with other oils for cooking, salad dressings and other uses due to its strong flavor and color.
Try cooked mashed pumpkin in cake and muffin recipes for added moisture and texture.
Higher temperatures cause pumpkin flesh to become stringy. If you end up with a stringy pumpkin, you can beat the pulp with an electric mixer on high speed for ten seconds and then switch to low speed for sixty seconds. The strings should wrap around the beaters for easy removal.
Homemade pureed pumpkin for pies is usually much thinner in texture than canned. To alleviate excess moisture, bake rather than steam or boil the pumpkin. Mash and drain through cheesecloth before using in pies.

The Bottom Line

This is the year to change up the menu and surprise your customers with either some new additions or new versions of their favorite dishes. Pumpkin has become a trendy flavor consumers look for as soon as fall comes around. Customers love pumpkin pie, pumpkin spice, and pumpkin pastries. Take your food truck menu to another level this season by adding unique pumpkin items.

How are you adding pumpkin to your food truck menu? Leave your recipes in the comments or social media. Facebook | Twitter

By Richard Myrick|2018-10-22T08:42:54-04:00Oct 22, 2018|Menu Design|

About the Author: Richard Myrick

Richard Myrick is an architect by degree (Lawrence Technological University, Southfield, Michigan) who began his career in real estate development and architectural planning. In September of 2010 he created Mobile Cuisine Magazine to fill an information void he found when he began researching how to start a mobile hotdog cart in Chicago. Richard found that there was no central repository of mobile street food information anywhere on the internet, and with that, the idea for MCM was born. Richard also wrote the "Running a Food Truck for Dummies" available in bookstores everywhere and Amazon. You can reach out to Richard by email at: [email protected].