I’m having a run of squash tasting with chef students for the fruit that has been storing up well. I’m reading up on the references pushed by @ThomasPicard esp. the Brent Loy material and now I understand the grower’s paradox. I’m turning around and redefining my selection criteria on that basis.
The students and chefs all want to eat squash and pumpking late October and early November (and then for some reason the interest wanes). I think the market taught them to behave like this. It certainly seems that the culinary reasons don’t hold up. I now understand why many squash taste better later in season and why those that are made to give a good early crop might not have as extraordinary good eating qualities.
My new goals are looking more like this, chronologically in the rough order they’ll be on the menu:
- Late summer / early fall: Long-necked Zuccheta-landrace (immature moschata). Still same idea.
- Winter pepo (acorn, delicata). Smaller sizes and can still be eaten among the first storage cucurbits.
- Mid-winter mature moschata
- Long-storage maxima
This time (late February) the fruit that came out as clear top scorers were a sweet dumpling type acorn-pepo, a delicata pepo and kabocha-type. Some fruits that continue to divide testers are the ones that don’t have common squash taste and are not sweet but have different aromas like cucumber and melon - most tasters dislike this flavor profile, but there are very often some that really like it. It goes to show that people like different things. I try to keep some of these seeds because of it and don’t want to get rid of these differences. Still not quite sure which direction to take it in. Perhaps isolate those kinds of fruits and see if they can be more pronounced? A feedback I also got from a chef was that they generally find squash boring! The good ones are sweet and fitting for desserts, but too little aroma to make interesting savory food. This is something to work on!
