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I Tried the Viral Pumpkin-Carving Hack That’s All Over Facebook

Meghan Splawn
Meghan Splawn
Meghan was the Food Editor for Kitchn's Skills content. She's a master of everyday baking, family cooking, and harnessing good light. Meghan approaches food with an eye towards budgeting — both time and money — and having fun. Meghan has a baking and pastry degree, and spent the…read more
published Oct 12, 2020
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(Image credit: Meghan Splawn)

Last year, our pumpkins had been sitting on the front porch, unadorned, for weeks. My 6-year-old had been pestering me every day to carve hers into a cat and I had been avoiding it — mostly because I didn’t want to deal with sticking my arm into sticky, slimy pumpkin guts to make way for carving.

Then I saw a pumpkin cleaning hack on a Facebook video that inspired me to put it to the test and finally carve pumpkins with my kids. The results were surprisingly delightful.

(Image credit: Meghan Splawn)

The Pumpkin Cleaning Hack That Actually Works

The video I originally saw belongs to HGTV and includes everything from opening the pumpkin to decorating it with a power drill. The hack that caught my eye, though, was using the beater from my hand mixer and the power drill to clean the guts out with ease. By inserting the beater into the drill like a drill bit and using the power of the drill to quickly scrape the sides, this hack seemed to miraculously clean the pumpkin guts off the pumpkin in mere seconds.

I was skeptical, but tried it anyway. My husband did a quick web search to make sure we didn’t need any special tools and charged our drill’s battery. Most instructions suggest you use the beater blade from an old hand-mixer in case the beater bends from the pressure. While I bet you could find a spare at a thrift store, I took the chance using the beater from my everyday KitchenAid hand mixer.

(Image credit: Meghan Splawn)

The rest is actually really simple: You stick the beater directly into the drill, put the drill inside the pumpkin, and, with the drill running, scrape the inside of the pumpkin (working from the top to the bottom) until the pumpkin guts are all sitting in the bottom of the pumpkin. Then you can dump the pumpkin guts out into the compost or a bowl (to sort through for roasting the seeds later) and begin carving.

And you guys? This really worked! As someone who really does not enjoy the process of cleaning out a pumpkin, I’ll never go back to doing it any other way. I did have to stop once and remove pumpkin guts that got caught up in the blade, but otherwise mere minutes of mixing with the drill knocked all the guts out of the pumpkin. And as for my beater blade, it’s washed and dried and back with the hand mixer for future use.

This post originally ran on Kitchn. See it there: I Tried the Viral Pumpkin-Carving Hack That’s All Over Facebook