Pumpkin seeds are a perfect high-energy snack, trail mix ingredient, salad topper, or nut butter mix-in. The flat, tear-shaped green pumpkin seeds are sold pre-packaged or in bulk, often without their whitish shells, but the shells are actually edible.

A pepita is a type of pumpkin seed that does not have a shell due to a naturally occurring mutation of the field pumpkin. They come from cucurbit varieties known as hulless, or Styrian, pumpkins and are quite valuable for pumpkin seed oil production due to their lack of hulls.

You can find pepitas at specialty food stores, online, or at Latin grocery stores, as they are popular in Mexican cuisine. Translating to “little seeds of squash,” pepitas are light to dark green, and are a bit plumper, rounder, and more oily than other pumpkin seeds.