Once again, let us express that this process will not work with every type of gourd out there, and larger gourds are susceptible to damage through shriveling. Please do not try this on your prize gourds until you have experimented enough to have a feel for what will and will not work. In the process of doing these experiments, we lost some very nice gourds, based on theory and thoughts, so we highly recommend you try a sampling of what you have before jumping in with those prize babies.

On the thoughts of gourds and baking gourds, and a method of cleaning someone mentioned to us of steaming a gourd, (they said this is what the Koreans do), it suddenly hit us. What is a gourd? It is a vegetable, I wouldn’t want to eat one, but it is a vegetable. What happens when you poach or boil a vegetable? It gets soft and mushy. So, here is what happened when we put this idea to the test.

We first take a gourd that we are going to cut open, to make a planter, a scene on the inside, a vase, etc. Go ahead and make the cut now, while it is green, using a teaspoon we scooped out the bulk of the vegetable matter so the water could get to the insides of the gourd, put it in a large pan full of water and started the boiling process. We let it boil for about 1-2 hours, you will see the white veggie matter turning clear, almost like gelatin. Another note to this, is the gourd will sink, or almost sink as the shell and the pulp become waterlogged. Once it is ready, remove the gourd from the pan, you can run some cool water on it so it is cool enough to hold on to, and with a teaspoon or table spoon, simply scoop out the insides the same way you would scrape the ice cream off the inside of your ice cream bowl.