In Absolute Best Tests, Ella Quittner destroys the sanctity of her home kitchen in the name of the truth. She’s boiled dozens of eggs, mashed a concerning number of potatoes, and seared more Porterhouse steaks than she cares to recall. Today, she tackles the butternut squash.
In October of 2022, Michigan-based farmer Derek Ruthrouff claimed the Guiness World Record for the heaviest butternut squash. Ruthrouff presented a hulking specimen that weighed in at just above one hundred and four pounds. Three weeks later, I consumed roughly the same volume of butternut squash. I did not win an award for it.
Squash was first cultivated more than 8,000 years ago in Mexico and Peru, but the butternut variety was bred by a man in Massachusetts in the middle of the twentieth century. It has a lamp-shaped body and flesh the color of American cheese, and when prepared deftly, it tastes like a sweetened, concentrated pumpkin — a touch vegetal, and noticeably nutty. There is little more that is winter-affirming than a perfectly cooked butternut squash, soft and candy-like, buttery and rich. Good butternut squash can be revelatory. Good butternut squash can turn around your whole day. Which I know, because three weeks after Rutherouff won that fancy award — and international glory — for his enormous home-grown contribution to the butternut canon, I dropped two full sheet pans of roasted squash onto my living room floor and my (bare) feet.
All of this to say, I may not have come out of the latest round of Absolute Best Tests with a trophy, but I did come away from my battlefield (my home, which is now covered in smears of squash in places you couldn’t dream of) with hard-earned intel and the discovery that a perfect bite of squash soothes all ills. Even the kind of ill where you thought you washed your feet thoroughly but hours later you look down to find another little bit of squash on your toe. Let’s dive in:
Controls:
I cooked eight butternut squashes of roughly the same size, about two pounds apiece. Yes, my husband did look at the kitchen counter and then at me and, saying nothing, delivered just a swift shake of his head, before he silently walked from the room.
For methods that required the squash to be peeled and cut down, I did as follows:
Peel squash with a vegetable peeler. To cut squash in half lengthwise, slice about 1/2 inch off the top and bottom to make flat sides; stand the squash up on a cutting board and carefully slide down the center with a large, sharp knife to make two roughly-even halves. Scrape out the seeds with a spoon.
For cooking methods that involved using a fat, I used extra-virgin olive oil. I seasoned only with Diamond Crystal kosher salt.
Round one: Roasting
1. Roast whole
Ingredients:</…….