Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

Category: File - :Pumpkin seeds in hand.jpg|thumb|Pumpkin seeds just scooped from the fruit

Category: Image - :Pepitas.JPG#file|thumb|right|180px|Pumpkin seeds after shelling, roasting, and salting

A pepita (from Mexican Spanish: pepita de calabaza, "little seed of squash") or pumpkin seed is an edible seed of a pumpkin or other cultivar of squash (genus Cucurbita), typically rather flat and asymmetrically oval, and light green in color inside a white hull. The word can refer either to the hulled kernel or unhulled whole seed, and most commonly refers to the roasted end product. The pressed oil of the roasted seeds of a specific pumpkin variety is also used in Central and Eastern European cuisine (see Pumpkin seed oil).

Pepitas are a popular ingredient in Mexican cuisine and are also roasted and served as a snack. Pepita Preparation Marinated and roasted, they are an autumn seasonal favorite in the rural United States, as well as a commercially produced and distributed packaged snack, like sunflower seeds, available year-round. Pepitas are known by their Spanish name (usually shortened), and typically salted and sometimes spiced after roasting (and today also available as a packaged product), in Mexico and other Latin American countries, in the American Southwest, and in speciality and Mexican food stores. In the Americas, they have been eaten since at least the time of the Aztecs and probably much earlier, since squash was one of the three earliest plant domesticates in the Western Hemisphere, along with maize (corn) and common beans (collectively the Native American agricultural "Three Sisters", originating in Mexico).

They are often simply called pumpkin seeds in English. As an ingredient in mole dishes, they are known in Spanish as pipian. Lightly roasted, salted, unhulled pumpkin seeds are popular in Greece with the descriptive Italian name, passatempo ("pastime").