Winter Squash 101: words and pictures. 8 January 2008 8:19 pm
Posted by Tracy in : cooking, friends, ingredients, pictures, winter squash , trackbackThis post is dedicated to Debbie, who asked about prepping winter squash for Gladys’s Rice and Bean Stew.
Winter squash are delicious but labor-intensive, as I attempt to demonstrate in the following photo series. Whenever possible, I highly recommend roasting them in their more or less inedible hard outer skins, the better to scoop out their delicious cooked flesh without any of that pesky peeling beforehand. But sometimes you want chunks of squash, as in the above-mentioned stew, or winter squash risottos, and so on. In that case, you’ve got a little more work ahead of you, and here’s how I do that work.
First, you’ll need a winter squash, in this case an acorn squash, but the same general principles apply to butternuts and kabochas and sweet dumplings and delicatas and so on:
Cut the squash in half (you don’t need a big scary chef’s knife but I like showing mine off; those funny serrated knives they sell for carving pumpkins are perhaps the very best tool for this job):
The above represents my best effort at a picture of this process (it’s sort of a two-handed job, which made it hard to use a camera at the same time), but here’s the result:
Scoop out the seeds and guts, with a spoon or an ice cream scooper or something of that ilk (again, not so much with the pictures except the result):
In the case of butternut squash and some delicatas and kabochas you can go ahead and peel it with the vegetable peeling tool of your choice, but in the case of ridgier squash like acorns and sweet dumpings (and some delicatas and kabochas) you’ll have to cut the squash into more easily-peeled pieces, usually wedges, like so:
When your squash is peeled, cut it into bite-size pieces, like so:
And here’s the results of the whole process, from beginning to end:
Yum! Happy squashing!
Comments»
So cool! Now I feel totally special. Maybe I’ll take more pictures next time I make marshmallows to share with you :)
I love your bright cutting board!
Oh great and glorious food guru! How can you tell a squash is rip enough to enjoy? I bought a kabocha for tempura, and it was way too hard to handle. It felt sort of soft, but when I tried to butcher it I met tremendous resistence, and peeling was completely out of the questions. Just curious if you had any ideas.
Thanks Debbie! Your marshmallows did look very impressive, so I’d be excited about more pictures! Thanks Liz! I am a big fan of the flexible plastic cutting board and shiny colors definitely don’t hurt! Thanks Cj! I don’t know what to say about your kabocha except that winter squash are supposed to be hard — they’re actually sorta soft until fully ripened. I’m just glad your story didn’t end with “and then my knife wasn’t sharp enough and it slipped and an innocent passerby lost an ear.”
[...] Winter Squash 101, I described the process of cutting a winter squash into bite-size pieces suitable for a recipe [...]