For 6 people: 6 egg yolks, 2 whole eggs, 100 g sugar, Styrian pumpkin seed oil (4-6 tbsp, to taste and color). Caramel: 150 g sugar, 150 pumpkin seeds. 1/2 l whipping cream.
Whip the eggs and egg yolks until light and fluffy, stir in the 100 g sugar and dissolve completely. Add the pumpkin seed oil.
For the caramel, caramelise the 150 g sugar with 4 tbsp water in a small saucepan until not too dark. Toast the pumpkin seeds in a pan without fat and stir them into the caramel. Put everything on baking parchment or on a cold plate coated with pumpkin seed oil. Allow to cool and chop in the refrigerator. Stir the pumpkin seed caramel into the egg mixture. Whip the cream until stiff and fold in. Pour the parfait mixture into a pretty crystal bowl or portioned molds and freeze, preferably overnight in the freezer. Remove in time before serving so that the parfait does not arrive at the table hard as a bone.
Michel Mehner serves a delicately tart ragout of dwarf oranges (kumquats) with it.
With Waldemar Thomas at Blaul and Zirker pumpkins
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Pumpkins, botanically speaking berry fruits by the way, originate from the New World, melons and cucumbers belonging to the same group from the old, but all from the tropics. So Fred Paul began to study this diverse flock while studying tropical agriculture. He was particularly fascinated by pumpkins and made them the subject of his thesis. The tropical vegetable, along with corn and beans, still forms the trio of staple foods of the Native American population of much of the Americas.
In our country, pumpkins are becoming visibly more popular, due to their mostly pretty shape and the fact that they can be used a lot in the kitchen. You can enjoy the Turkish turban, which looks just like its name, for quite a while until you slaughter it and make a soufflé out of it. You have to season it well and add cheese, advises Ruth Zirker, because the attractive pumpkin has hardly anything to offer in terms of flavour.
That's true of many varieties, which is why pumpkin doesn't exactly get the gourmets among us excited. That may be due to ignorance, since there are about 800 varieties. Fred Blaul and Ruth Zirker grow about 15 of them organically, in addition to about 5 ornamental pumpkins. The group of moschata pumpkins, the most exquisite of which is called Patidou, has a lot of flavour. It is only small, but full of flavour. Like marzipan, if you bake a well ripened one in the oven. Next: pear-shaped butternut with a note reminiscent of nuts and avocado. Its flesh is so firm that you can fry cutlets from it. The flavor of the buttercup, on the other hand, is close to that of chestnuts, it is the most floury of the group. For her favourite dish, pumpkin puree with sausage and lamb's lettuce, Mrs Zirker uses Hokkaido pumpkins, also mealy. The children's favourite is undoubtedly spaghetti squash, weighing up to 2 kilos. Halved and cooked in the oven, the orange-red flesh can be wound into strings like the popular noodles. There's not much to the smallest squash, "Jack be little", but it tastes like sweet chestnuts. It's best baked in the oven and spooned out of the shell. At the other end of the scale is Gargantua squash, one of which weighed 65 kilos last year and had to be transported on a pallet, Fred Blaul recalls. The most popular is the large Muscat pumpkin, which can be used in many ways, including sweet and sour pickling.
Whoever wants to grow pumpkins themselves should do so in loose, humus-rich soil that warms well; a south-facing slope would be ideal. The pumpkin does not like frost, but a good water supply. Those who do it too well will get more leaves than pumpkins, like those who sow too narrowly: 1 seed per m2 is recommended by Fred Blaul. Although the loess soil on the northern edge of the Palatinate is well suited to pumpkins; with the Styrian ones, however, whose roasted seeds produce the wonderful, almost black oil, they have had no luck so far at Hof Morgentau. Which shouldn't stop you at home from approaching a pumpkin seed brittle parfait, as best remembered by the market leader from Michel and Margret Mehner's restaurant "M&M" in Kempten in the Allgäu.
BIOLAND-Hof Morgentau
Fred Blaul and Ruth Zirker
Wormser Str. 1
67259 Kleinniedesheim (near Worms)
Phone: 06239-3381
Fax: 06239-6155
Öffnungszeiten: Sale ex farm: Tue 15 to 18, u. Fri 14-18, Sat 10-12 Uhr.
from Waldemar Thomas