[Sca-cooks] Using fresh pumpkin instead of canned in a recipe?

[Tara Sersen Boroson]

I feel like such an idiot asking this ;)  You know, I've made pumpkin 
pie and pumpkin soups many times in the past, and have always used fresh 
pumpkins, never ever canned.  But, I've always chosen recipes that 
*called* for fresh.  I have no idea what they do to pumpkin before they 
can it, if it's really comparable to the real stuff.

So, can anybody tell me, if a recipe calls for solid-pack canned 
pumpkin, can I use roasted mashed pumpkin one-for-one by volume?  
Alternately, in some old time cookbooks I have here I see advice to 
roast the pumpkins, mash the flesh, then tie it up in cheesecloth to let 
it drip and condense like making yogurt cheese.  Do they condense it 
like this before canning?

I have a coupla nice pumpkins sitting begging to become a hearty soup.  
I was going to use my regular recipe, but then I had a curried pumpkin 
soup with coconut milk at a cafe and thought I'd died and gone to 
heaven.  Lo, I found such a recipe at epicurious, but it calls for 
solid-pack canned.   I just want to make sure it's not going to turn out 
all watery or anything before I invest the time and ingredients...

Thank you!
-Magdalena vander Brugghe
lurker of late...

-- 
Tara Sersen Boroson

'Normal' is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car you are still paying for, in order to get to the job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car, and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it. -Ellen Goodman

[T]o admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. -Virginia Woolf