Caramelizing Stuff
I would caramelize onions from time to time, primarily for French onion soup. But I hadn’t thought of reducing any other produce, concentrating and transforming its flavor to an amazing degree. I got this whole idea from Vivian Howard’s Deep Run Roots, and her take on summer squash and onions. That’s what I’m going to show you in this post. But, it doesn’t stop there. I later came across Alana Chernila’s recipe for Caramelized Cabbage Soup in her book Eating from the Ground Up. It’s a take on French Onion Soup, where half of the onions are replaced with cabbage. It worked really well. Since then, I’ve experimented with other things such as green beans, sweet red peppers and winter squash. Those will be topics for other posts. Experiment with them on your own if you’re curious. Anyway, back to the main topic.
Summer Squash
Before getting into the recipe, let’s talk about summer squash. The photo above shows five varieties. On the bottom, from left to right we have a standard zucchini, a zephyr squash, a yellow squash, a golden zucchini and then are also three patty pan squashes in different colors. To me, these are all just summer squash. They are all the same species, Cucurbita pepo. If you taste raw slices of them side by side, you can detect small differences in flavor. But cook them up in a recipe, I doubt anyone could do a blind taste test and determine which is which. If a recipe calls for zucchini, but you only have yellow squash, go ahead and substitute. My favorite is the patty pan. That’s simply because they have the best flesh to seed ratio of them all. Smaller squash is better than larger. They have more flavor and less seeds.
The Method
The idea is really simple and works just like caramelized onions. Slice up some squash and onions in a two to one ratio. Put them in a big ol’ pot with some garlic, cooking fat, salt and pepper. Cook them for a good long time. At first you can use relatively high heat and stir infrequently as the squash and onions give up so much water that they’ll basically poach in their own juices. As the water evaporates you must give them more attention and potentially lower the heat to keep up. You alternate between leaving them sit still while a flavorful brown fond develops on the bottom and sides of the pot and scraping with a wooden spatula to release the fond and stir it into the squash and onions. It will likely be an hour before you are done. The final product takes up a fifth of the space in the pan compared to where you start. At this point it’s literally spreadable, and the flavors are so concentrated your guests won’t believe it started as subtle summer squash.
What Do You Do With It?
Well, it’s super tasty just eating it by the spoonful. But you can do so much more. Here are a few ideas:
Make a Savory Galette
To learn more about savory galettes, check out my post covering the Savory Galette Mother Dish Technique. Here, I made a full batch of caramelized squash and onions, and I had this savory pie dough ready to roll out. I grated up four ounces of flavorful cheese. I mixed half of the cheese into the squash and onions and reserved half to spread around the top of the galette. Standard galette assembly – pile the stuff in the middle of the rolled out dough, fold the edges of the dough over the stuff, apply an egg wash to the exposed crust and bake in a 425 F oven until the crust is golden brown.
Make a Pizza
Whatever crust options and baking techniques are your go-to options for pizza, you can make a really interesting option using caramelized summer squash and onions. Here I used a garlic infused olive oil as the base. For that, simply mince up a couple cloves of garlic and gently simmer them in a couple tablespoons of olive oil. You don’t want to bring any color to the garlic. Simmer just long enough to take the raw edge off the garlic and to infuse the garlic flavor throughout the oil. Anyway, garlic olive oil base, dab some squash and onions around, then top with a tasty, melty cheese.
Make Some Pasta
Here, after whipping up a batch of caramelized squash and onions, I sautéed a quarter pound of spicy Italian sausage (one link, removed from its casing), breaking it into small bits as it cooked. Simultaneously I prepared dry orecchiette (any short pasta would work as well). When the pasta was ready, I reserved a bit of the starchy pasta water. I mixed the pasta into the squash, onion and sausage mixture and added a couple tablespoons of the pasta water. To serve, I topped with a bit of Pecorino Romano and fresh basil.
Time Lapse Photo Recipe Guide
Caramelized Summer Squash and Onions
Ingredients
- 3 pounds summer squash
- 1 ½ pounds onions
- 2-3 cloves garlic
- 2 ounces cooking fat bacon fat, butter or vegetable oil - see note
- 1 ½ tsp salt
- ½ tsp freshly ground black pepper
Instructions
- Cut the squash into ¼ inch slices. If they are large you may want to slice them end to end first. Julienne slice the onions. Mince the garlic.
- Add the cooking fat to a large pot (at least 5 quarts) and heat it on medium high.
- Add the squash, onions, garlic and salt and pepper to the pot. Stir the pot from top to bottom to disperse the cooking fats over the vegetables. The raw squash and onions can fill a 5 quart pot, so this will be difficult at first, but they will quickly reduce in size making stirring easier.
- Stir occasionally as the squash and onions give up their water and poach in their own juices.
- After their water has evaporated, browning will start to happen. A brown fond should develop on the sides and bottom of the pan. Using a wooden spatula, scrape the fond from the pan and stir it into the squash and onions. Repeat this regularly. If this gets away from you, take the pot off heat, stir in a tablespoon of water, and let things sit for a couple minutes. This should loosen the fond and allow you to scrape it into the dish. Return to heat and continue the process.
- Expect the total time on heat to be about 60 minutes. The dish is done when the squash and onions have gained considerable brown color and have reduced to less than one fifth their original size,
