Thursday, November 13, 2008

Squash 2 Π - Part 1

The last day of the farmer's market, a slippery squash salesman talked Guy into buying this monster squash. The price was $3, a very good veg to dollar ratio. Apparently, this is a good type of squash to make into pumpkin pie.
After giving the squash a bath, hack it to bits. Its harder then it looks, this is one mighty squash. Remove the seeds from the bell at the bottom, an ice cream scoop works well.
The next step is to steam the squash. We got out our very large, 20 quart, beer brewing pot. Put a veggie steaming basket or a stainless steel colander at the bottom, add a couple of inches of water and pack the squash in. This one filled the entire pot. We cooked it for 30 minutes (a smaller squash should cook in half the time) and it was really nice and mushy.

Peel off the skins. If your squash is watery, let it sit in a colander for a few hours to drain.

After we got to this point, we had to take a break and our squash turned into a giant squashsicle. Hopefully, it will turn into pie soon. If you must know, the story ends with pureeing, seasoning, making pie crust, baking and eating.

3 comments:

Lona said...

Instead of steaming, I think baking could be done instead. Then you wouldn't have to worry about the squash getting too watery. Anyway, that is the way I do it before the pie step. You wouldn't need to cut it as much.

Emily said...

You can also microwave it some (though I know this is not the purist approach), this is WAY faster than baking- though it sounds like steaming was pretty fast, too.

Piri said...

Steaming does work pretty fast. I imagine it would take a lot of microwaves to cook this monster squash.