How to Cook (Better) With Butternut Squash

The joy and peril of butternut squash season is that it can seem endless. While it runs from early fall to well into winter, the squash’s hearty nature means good ones can be found even beyond winter, maybe even longer than your appetite for them lasts. When leaves start to turn shades of orange, yellow and red, it’s exciting to see those sweet, earthy gourds. But months later, when the landscape grows darker, grayer, frostier, our attitudes toward butternut squash can, too. Combat those icy feelings before they even arise with these seven tricks for making the most of butternut squash.

1. When in doubt, roast it

Of all cooking methods (simmering, steaming), it seems like squash is best when it’s roasted. When cooked at a high temperature, the dense squash caramelizes with ease, letting its sweetness and nuttiness shine. You can even skip the harrowing task of peeling: The oven can crisp the skin, adding a pleasant snap against the fudgy flesh.

2. Blend it up for a creamy soup

Once hardy butternut squash is soft enough to mash with a fork, it’s also tender enough to blend into a creamy soup. Because of the flesh’s starch and pectin, it can whirl into something shiny, thick and luxurious without any cream. Just take a look at Yewande Komolafe’s recipe, which doubles down on the squash’s warmth by roasting it until caramelized and infusing the soup with spices such as cinnamon and black pepper.

3. Add coconut

Coconut milk reinforces the sweet and creamy side of blended squash while also bringing its own floral essence to the pot. To keep the combination from being too cloying, Christian Reynoso then adds pep with curry paste, ginger and turmeric.

4. Sprinkle pumpkin seeds over

Because pumpkin and butternut squash are part of the same plant family, they have undertones that suggest that they belong together. The flavors are simpatico, and their textures play off one another, the seeds adding crunch to the squash’s softness. Nik Sharma uses that to his advantage in his butternut, lentil and feta salad, showering pumpkin seeds over to lend crunch to the otherwise soft salad.

5. Cook it with honey

Sometimes squash’s vegetal earthiness can overshadow its natural sugars. (Also, variety and growing and storage conditions impact sweetness.) But there’s an easy solve: To amp up its caramelly sweetness, cook the squash with a little honey, brown sugar or maple syrup. Roasting 2 ½ pounds of squash with just a tablespoon of honey, like in Melissa Clark’s salad, does the trick.

6. Pair it with bitter vegetables

Walk through a wintertime farmers’ market and you’ll find some onions and potatoes, lots of squash and lots of bitter, hearty kale, broccoli rabe, collard greens and radicchio. Their sharpness is an ideal foil to squash’s amenable sweetness: The squash assuages some of the bitterness, while that bitterness adds pep. So cook squash with the greens, like in Zainab Shah’s kaddu with greens and shrimp, or combine raw greens with cooked squash, like in Yossy Arefi’s wild rice salad.

7. Finish with lime juice

Sweet and sour fish, pork, sauce, eggplant — the list goes on. The zip of something sour is a classic contrast to sweetness, so add lime juice or another sour ingredient to your butternut squash. In Priya Krishna’s kaddu, the squash simmers with the juice of a lime. Sour cream, tamarind or vinegar can also deliver a sweet-and-sour effect.

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Source: Elections - nytimes.com