What Are White Pumpkins?

When you think about decorating the front porch with pumpkins this autumn, you may picture the traditional varieties with their rich and warm orange hues. But there are more than 100 different types of pumpkins out there, and they come in an array of colors, from mottled green to blush and even white.

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What Are White Pumpkins?

While classic orange pumpkins are still crowd-pleasers, more and more farms and patches around the country are beginning to grow pale white pumpkins to meet the growing demand for them.

Classified as Cucurbita maxima, the term white pumpkin encompasses a multitude of pumpkin varieties. While they may look completely different from the pumpkins you grew up with, their primary differentiator is simply the color of the skin. In fact, if you cut inside most of these varieties, they look the same as your standard orange.

The history of white pumpkins is fairly uncertain because they were slow to gain popularity. A few of the more common varieties found today were developed in the 1980s and 1990s.

While they’re often used for adorning front porches during the autumn season, they’re also growing in popularity in cooking and baking. Some even say the white pumpkin varieties make better tasting pumpkin pie than orange pumpkins!

See more: 27 Pumpkin Recipes to Make This Fall

How to Use White Pumpkins

Most people purchase white pumpkins for ornamental displays. But you can use them for everything from baking to roasting in the kitchen. Certain varieties make for excellent waffles, bread, puddings and tarts. Others are delicious cubed and roasted and added to salads or pastas.

White Pumpkin Varieties

Want to get a few white pumpkins of your own for decorations or cooking this fall? Here are some varieties to consider:

Baby Boo: Miniature in size and bright white in color, Baby Boos are too small to carve or eat but make for delightful decorations if you cluster several together.

Casper: Perhaps one of the prettiest of the white pumpkins, the Casper variety is a brilliant shade of white and makes a great candidate for anyone wanting to bake or make pumpkin pie. It’s not considered the best for carving, although it can certainly be painted if you want to use it for decoration.

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Lumina: Lumina pumpkins have a smooth skin with vibrant yellow flesh on the inside. They are prized for their flavor, which means you can easily use them for all your favorite pumpkin pie recipes. And while you can carve them and use them to adorn the front porch this fall, bear in mind that they won’t last as long as other varieties.

Valencia: Also known as the “White Ghost,” this pure white pumpkin has a tough skin and is squat more than round. Its shape makes it understandably difficult to carve, so it’s best used for cooking and baking or displaying whole.

White Pie: As the name suggested, the White Pie pumpkin is one of the best contenders for anyone wanting to make exceptionally tasty desserts. The flavor profile is sweet and buttery, and a single pumpkin is considered enough to make an entire pie on its own.