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Oven pumpkin with a jar of Fulmer honey

Oven pumpkin with venison polpette, gorgonzola and honey – the best soul food!

December 3rd, 2023 | main dishes

I love adding honey to savory dishes! There is nothing better. In my current recipe I have combined the finest acacia honey with buttery oven-baked pumpkin, orientally spiced venison polpette and slightly bitter radicchio. Plus a strong blue cheese and roasted pine nuts – all topped off with mild, aromatic Fulmer acacia honey. My personal favorite soul food for fall.

Oven pumpkin with venison polpette, gorgonzola and honey – the best soul food!

[This article was created in cooperation with Fulmer Honey and contains advertising.]

The Hungarian beekeeping Fulmer is a real traditional honey brand that has existed for almost a hundred years, more precisely since 1929. The Fulmer team invited me to taste their honey and cook with it. Just unpacking the package gave me great joy: I have rarely had such beautifully packaged food in my hands. The Limited Edition with a wooden lid in particular is very, very high-quality in terms of packaging and design. You can feel how much passion and love the Fulmer team invests in their products.

When cooking with honey, the quality of the product is of course important. It can’t be high enough. And of course: you shouldn’t “cook” honey, you should just use it to refine a dish. When heating, we destroy all of the important and valuable ingredients in honey, which is why honey should only be drizzled onto the plate at the very end or used in a dressing. This is the only way to preserve all the valuable ingredients – after all, honey is not just a food, but also medicine.

Basically, I was surprised at the variety of my Fulmer sample package: I have never seen coriander honey anywhere, let alone tried it, for example. And the acacia honey – a dream: clear and transparent, a silky taste and an unobtrusive, soft, floral scent. It was clear to me that it would go wonderfully with my recipe for oven-baked pumpkin with venison polpette, gorgonzola and honey.

Who is this Fulmer family business?

Almost a hundred years ago, György Fulmer founded the traditional apiary with a few bee colonies in Hungary. At the same time, Ferenc Takács started his beekeeping. In 1959 Ferenc married Maria, György Fulmer’s daughter. Together they laid the foundation for today’s company, which is now successful on the market in its fourth generation. In addition to further developing his own beekeeping, Ferenc Fulmer began packaging and selling the honey of his beekeeper friends early on. His plan worked: Today, the Fulmer team sells not only their own honey but also that of partner beekeepers from Gibraltar to the mountains of Central Asia – and all of this meets the strict Fulmer quality standards and with great success.

Keep your eyes open when buying honey

By the way, you can never be too careful when choosing your honey. Media reports give rise to concern that a large proportion of the honey offered in the EU is not pure honey without additives or pollutants. Research has shown that up to 46 % of honey on sale contains additives that are banned in the EU. With honey from the Fulmer family business, however, you get the purest quality; here there is nothing but pure, natural honey. That’s how it should be!

I can only warmly recommend the Hungarian acacia honey. It impresses with its special, mild taste and a very pleasant scent. It comes from the nectar of the acacia trees in Hungarian forests. The honeycomb in the glass is something very special: The Fulmer team uses precisely fitting wooden frames in the beehives, which offer the bees an ideal shape and surface so that the honeycomb can be built directly into them. The small frames ensure that the structure of the honeycomb is not changed in any way during removal.

How does the Fulmer team control quality?

From the hive to the packaging, all products undergo a five-fold inspection that is unique in the world: the origin of the honey is personally and continuously checked. “The origin and quality of the honey is under complete control”, that is Fulmer’s quality guarantee.

When cooking high-quality, unprocessed and pure products are extremely important to me. This is also the case, especially with honey. It’s needless to say that I topped and refined my recipe below with Fulmer honey. I hope you have fun in trying out this recipe and enjoy!

Baked pumpkin with venison polpette, gorgonzola and honey

(4 servings – preheat oven to 175°C)

VENISON POLPETTE (MEATBALLS)

2 cloves of garlic, finely diced
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2 TS olive oil
sauté the garlic and onions in the oil until soft
500 g minced venison*
1 ½ ts coriander, ground
¾ ts cinnamon, ground
¼ ts allspice, ground
¼ ts chili, ground
1 ts salt
black pepper from the mill
2 ts tomato paste
2 TS quark
2 heaped ts of tarragon mustard**
mix all the ingredients thoroughly, add the garlic and onions, mix again and form small meatballs
2 – 3 TS olive oil
fry the polpette on all sides in the hot oil, remove from the pan and set aside

OVEN PUMPKIN

1.5 kg Hokkaido pumpkin***
wash the pumpkin, cut it in half, remove the seeds, then cut it into wedges without peeling and place it on a baking tray
1 ts salt
black pepper from the mill
1 ts cayenne pepper
3 TS olive oil
2 ts fresh or dried thyme leaves
1 – 2 red peppers, sliced with seeds
mix the ingredients, add to the pumpkin and mix the pumpkin wedges well with the spice mixture
cook in the oven at 175° C for about 20 minutes, 5 minutes before the end of the cooking time, spread the meat balls on the tray and
150 g Gorgonzola****
spread the cheese over the pumpkin, bake until finished, remove from the oven and let cool slightly
2 TS balsamic vinegar white
zest of ½ organic lemon
2 TS lemon juice
black pepper from the mill
½ ts salt
mix all the ingredients into a dressing
1 radicchio
tear into bite-sized pieces and mix with the dressing
3 TS pine nuts, toasted
zest of ½ organic lemon
a few thyme stalks
arrange the radicchio on the pumpkin and serve sprinkled with pine nuts, lemon zest and thyme

Alternatives to the recipe:

*Instead of venison minced meat, you can of course also use minced beef or lamb or mixed pork/beef mince. It’s a different taste, but definitely good too.

**Tarragon mustard can be swapped for plain mustard.

***Other types of pumpkin also work, such as butternut, but my experience says that Hokkaido pumpkin produces the best result in terms of taste and appearance.

**** A soft, creamy Gorgonzola is ideal, but you can also use other blue cheeses

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