Preserving Squash

Saturday, after the Ciderfest, I took a walk out to the garden to check on the winter squash. It has been cold and rainy for several weeks and we want to make sure we are salvaging the squash before it starts to go bad.

The Georgia candy roasters are the most susceptible of the winter squash. Not sure why this is. Any winter squash will rot if the rind is compromised and moisture gets in, but for whatever reason the Georgia candy roasters are the worst of the bunch.

Inspecting them in the garden, I saw that there were several beginning rotten spots and some slug damage on 4 of the 9 squash out there, and one was beyond salvaging, already almost all mush. So I picked all of them and brought them out of the rain.

Of course that was Saturday, and we did nothing on Sunday. Monday was too hectic between school, baking, laundry, cleaning up from the ciderfest, and getting to violin, so we weren’t able to get to them until Tuesday.

First step was bringing them inside…

And carefully wiping them down until they were clean and dry.

We put the ones without blemishes in Uncle’s “conservatory” as the only room in the house that stays consistently above 70 degrees. There, hopefully, under the heat and grow lights the rinds will cure and harden, they will finish ripening and achieve their full sweetness. That is their destiny.

We then peeled and cut bad spots out of the worst two, and split the better two in half and scooped out the seeds.

The two with the peels on went into the turkey roaster and in a restaurant pan in the oven with water in the bottom of each to steam slowly at 250 degrees over the next few hours.

The turkey roaster is pretty efficient, the restaurant pan is not. Oven temperature needs to be higher than 250 degrees.

The ones that had been peeled we cubed and put into a small stock pot to steam on the stove top. This was the fastest of all, and left some delightful chunks in the mash to lend a bit of texture.

Finally, all the squashes were scraped into a food grade plastic bucket.

And vigorously smashed.

We took the mash home with us after supper, and Daddy put it into vacuum packs of 4 cups each. 4 cups is the perfect amount for a pie, and let’s be honest, pie is mostly what we do with squash mash.

All together we got 6 bags, and we still have four more Georgia candy roasters to go, but we will probably leave those intact as long as possible, probably in the basement at the farm which at least has a humidifier. Those will probably be squash bakes for Lord’s Day dinners.

We still have the acorn squash, the delicata, the New England pie pumpkins, (about half of those are “curing” as decorations on our front porch), and the kabochas. They all need to come in soon, but time.