Sounds like something that wouldn’t taste too good doesn’t it? Well, this vegetable is much like a pumpkin but has a few differences. First as you can see, it has skin just like a watermelon, but it isn’t.

This is actually how we stumbled upon this vegetable. As I was looking for a new fruit to try, I saw this, mistook it for a fruit and bought the whole thing. So as I got home and opened it up expecting it to be a fruit, I noticed it looked a lot like a pumpkin, with the seeds and everything.

So we went around and asked different people how do you prepare this? Just like a pumpkin. So we have about 5 pounds of this fruit vegetable thing and have no idea what we can do with it. So we decided to cook it like a pumpkin and its good for a pumpkin pie type of dessert. Here in the DR you can generally get an auyama for a few hundred pesos. Not to bad for a pumpkin!

The Spanish word auyama literally translates into pumpkin so how different could it get for a pumpkin that we know in the states. Not too much! Just a little cheaper and looks a little different. It seems like, with most things here, that auyama has different time periods that it grows and not year round like some of the plants that we have in the United states.

The auyama plant is a vine that wraps itself around other things like trees and fence posts. Here one of the things that we see is people using a specific area to grow auyama and using a sort of supporting table that they put underneath the auyama so it doesn’t break off before it is completely ripened.

Cooking with Auyama

The Auyama can be used for many different interesting things, even to be used as a cleaner as I have heard from a few different people, at least the skin can be used. One of the most common uses in the D.R. for Auyama is in habichuelas. you cook 5 pesos of Auyama when you are cooking the beans and mix it in when you add the spices, this makes your beans creamier.

Well, this is one of the foods that we see on a daily basis in our home the Dominican Republic.