PING Jill: butternut squash question

hopitus wrote:

USA made knives suck for quality. Germany also makes quality cutlery.
Your chef friend, Joyce, is right about $40 knives, but *he* uses
them
for his living. You and I can cook happily and successfully, as *we*
are not chefs.

Wow, I don't know what happened, but somehow this entire thread ended
up in my killfile. I was wondering what happened to it!

Anyway, my friend is an *amateur* gourmet cook, it's not his career.
He loves to cook wonderful meals at home, though, and I've been lucky
enough to be a dinner guest on quite a few occasions.

He's a serious hobbyist about knives, particularly Japanese knives,
which made Takayuki's post about his father passing down a knife to
him, and it still being useful umpteen decades later, interesting to
me.

Joyce

--
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary
and those who don't.

Yowie wrote:

On 6/08/2010 11:16 PM, jmcquown wrote:

Except Joyce (and Yowie) were referring to the Roasted Butternut Squash
Soup recipe I posted for Matthew. Nuking it just won't create the same
taste (or texture) as roasting the split whole squash.

Absolutely. If you don't roast it, you don't give it time to develop the
sugars, and the soup will not have the complex, rich flavour that a soup
made with the roast pumpkin/squash will.

There we have it - chemical evidence of the difference!

Joyce

--
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary
and those who don't.

Jack Campin - bogus address wrote:

Use an old carbon steel chef's knife and keep it really sharp (there
are subtleties about how to do that, look it up). I've never paid
very much for one, but then I've been using the same knife as my main
kitchen tool for 20 years. You should be able to pick up a very good
one in a flea market for a few dollars. Stainless steel knives are
nowhere near as good (and are much harder to sharpen). So look for
one with rust stains.

I'm not sure I'd know a "good one" from a mediocre one when viewing a
random knife on someone's table at a flea market. Rust stains indicate
that it's not stainless steel - OK, I get that. But does that necessarily
mean it's a good knife? As I said, I know next to nothing about knives.

Second problem. The skin of the squash is so thin that there's no way
to scrape out the flesh without taking half the skin with it. How do
you do it?? There has to be a trick. I hope it doesn't involve leaving
large amounts of edible squash behind.

Once it's cooked properly, the flesh will scoop out of the skin easily.

Hmm. Define "properly". I've never experienced the flesh scooping
out of the skin easily. The skin tears, and a lot of it comes along with
the flesh. It's a pain to separate.

It's better not to take the seeds out before cooking, unless you want
to stuff the squash with something. The roasted seeds taste good and
have a lot of nutrients, eat them separately.

Good point.

Actually you don't need to remove the skin either. If it's clean
it's perfectly edible. The only bit of a butternut I never eat are
the fibrous knobs at the ends.

Hmm, hadn't considered that. I always cook potatoes with the skin on
and eat all of it, ditto for zucchini, and also for apples if I used
them in a dessert recipe. Skins are often very nutritious. But I didn't
realize squash skins were edible.

Joyce

--
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary
and those who don't.

jmcquown wrote:

Trust me, I'm cheap, too. I'm sure not spending $40+ for a single knife! I
use a cleaver. Give it a good whack down the middle then use a rocking
motion with your hand on top of the cleaver to cut all the way through. (If
the squash has a woody stem on the end cut that off first.)

To clarify: I *am* able to cut a squash width-wise, ie, I can cut the
thin end from the fat part (that contains the seeds). But that's not what
you were suggesting in your post, I assume. You were saying it should be
cut lengthwise, right? So both halves look pretty much the same. That's
harder to do because there's no really safe way to hold the squash in
place while cutting.

I don't find the skin of butternut squash to be too terribly thin, but once
it's roasted it *is* soft. The trick is to scoop out the flesh while the
squash is still hot (hence the oven mitt). I just use a table spoon. The
skin may tear a bit but I don't wind up with pieces of it in the soup. Nor
does it leave a lot of the squash itself behind.

I've scooped squashes both hot and cooled off, and it doesn't seem to make
any difference. I cool them off first, even refrigerate them sometimes, so
they're easy to handle. Maybe it's time to buy an oven mitt.

I don't think you could use pre-peeled chunks of squash for this recipe and
have it come out as intended.

You might be right, but I make other things with cooked, mashed up squash,
too.

Joyce

--
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary
and those who don't.

jmcquown wrote:

http://fruit4you.net.au/store/images/butternut.jpg

Yep, they're the same thing. Technically all hard-shelled squash could be
called pumpkins and vice versa

See, to me, a pumpkin's shell is quite different from that of a butternut
squash. The skin on the butternut squash seems paper-thin to me. Not something
you could make a jack o'lantern from!

Joyce

--
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary
and those who don't.

Takayuki wrote:

Maybe one of those ceramic knives would be good. The nice thing about
those is that you can use them to cut those overcooked airline steaks,
becase they don't set off metal detectors.

There's an airline that serves steaks? I haven't gotten a meal on a
plane in a few years now!

Joyce

--
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary
and those who don't.

Yowie wrote:

On 7/08/2010 2:39 AM, hopitus wrote:

Uh, I hate to bring this up, but one of our international friends here
has
already had a disaster with knives from Asian cutlery supply. What do
you think is gonna happen when they start with *cleavers*? Just
askin'.

I"ve missed something here. Who has a problem with Asian cutlery???

I think she might be referring to Tweed's thumb injury. Don't know whether
the knife was from Asia, though.

Joyce

--
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary
and those who don't.

Sherry wrote:

Yes! I was wondering when someone was going to mention that. It's the
same with sweet potatoes (yams)...the sugars do not develop unless
they are cooked properly. Nuking has a great place in cooking, but
this is one vegetable that doesn't lend itself well to the microwave.

I hardly ever use the microwave for cooking fresh vegetables, or anything,
actually. I do use it all the time to reheat food, but for the initial
cooking, I've found that there's nothing like oven baking or a frying
pan or wok for good flavor.

Joyce

--
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary
and those who don't.

Takayuki wrote:

If you're like me, do you also find that nothing can keep you more
occupied in a kitchen than chopping and slicing things? The knife is
like a total bottleneck!

Never mind $40, I would sell my soul for a knife if it could cut that
time significantly.

This is the reason I have been reduced to eating frozen, pre-cooked
meals on work nights. I'm just too tired, and also I have too little
time in my evening, to spend it chopping veggies. That's what the
weekend is for.

Joyce

--
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary
and those who don't.

In ,
jmcquown typed:
"Sherry" wrote in message
...
On Aug 7, 11:16 pm, Yowie wrote:
On 6/08/2010 11:16 PM, jmcquown wrote:

"Stormmee" wrote in message
...
(snippage)

Except Joyce (and Yowie) were referring to the Roasted Butternut
Squash Soup recipe I posted for Matthew. Nuking it just won't
create the same taste (or texture) as roasting the split whole
squash.

Absolutely. If you don't roast it, you don't give it time to develop
the sugars, and the soup will not have the complex, rich flavour
that a soup made with the roast pumpkin/squash will.

(Have tried to make it straight from raw pumpkin/squash without
roasting first, and thus know of what I speak)

Yowie

Yes! I was wondering when someone was going to mention that. It's the
same with sweet potatoes (yams)...the sugars do not develop unless
they are cooked properly. Nuking has a great place in cooking, but
this
is one vegetable that doesn't lend itself well to the microwave.
(more snippage)
Sherry
********
Thank you, Yowie and Sherry, for pointing that out! I was having
difficulty explaining it. It's just not the same to microwave
pumpkin/squash (or even saute pieces of it) and have the soup taste
the way my recipe intends. I'm sure the soup Lee makes is good but
it's just not the same as *roasted* butternut squash. I completely
agree about the sweet potatoes (yams), too

On /Kitchen Chemistry with Heston Blumenthal/ (on Discovery Channel),
Heston talks about sugars, starches (starch is a long, complex polymer of
sugar), proteins, gels, crystals etc etc and just why some things need to be
cooked in a certain way to bring out the best in flavour. being a chemist
myself, I could only nod and agree, and now fully understand why my mashed
potato has always tasted lousy. Since my only High Disctinction in chemistry
was Food Chemistry, I really ought to have known!

My favourite celebrity chef is, not coincidentally, Heston Blumenthal,
mostly because he explains why he's doing something in terms of its
chemistry, and even shows his disasters as well as his successes.

Yowie

(I'm not going to dissuade anyone from cooking their own, preferred, way. If
you like your butternut soup done via nuking, then by all means enjoy it
fully. Life's too short to argue about what *you* like, I only know what *I*
like!)