Baked slices of a 16 lb Fairytale pumpkin. Very soft flesh compared to kabocha or even butternut.
Taste: sweet and ideal for baking and dessert. Smells strongly of raspberry and vanilla. One of the best smelling pumpkins to bake.
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Thought this one was an overgrown and very ripe delicata. It was yellow with orange stripes, though 3 times larger than delicata, and more of a round shape, closer to spaghetti. The cashier called it a spaghetti. There was no sticker to say what it was. When we got it home we cut it in half and baked one half, cut side down on a tray at ~350 for 3 hours. The exposed flesh had dried and formed a skin-like texture. When poked, it was soft and broke into strands. It definitely smelled like delicata, and tasted a bit like it, though the flesh was a much lighter colour. It didnt make any juice while cooking, as most other squash do. The shell is unusually hard. At this point I looked up how to bake a stripetti. Most recipes recommend to bake the squash cut in half, cut side down in an inch of water. They also bake for 40-60 minutes. We put the squash back in the oven with a half inch of water in the pan. -2017 On another day, we mixed baked Stripetti squash with a cup or two of ground almonds, some cocoa powder and an egg and baked it, which we instantly concluded that this is the single best use for Stripetti squash, ever. As much as we were dissapointed by Stripetti in other recipes, we were impressed by its subtle honey flavour and just-moist-enough flesh for this brownie recipe. |
Fine grained, doesn't need to be blended. Makes very little water, meaning it doesn't have to be drained before using in the pie recipe.
Bought a squash labelled Kabocha today for $0.50. It had a withered, slightly brown spot and a small hole on the other side.
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Ontario Acorn: In late November we got loads of Ontario acorn squash from a local grocery store for about $0.25 /lb. They were unlike the usual acorn squash, the size and shape of these is more round and smooth, with pumpkin-like big ribs. They were also big and heavy for an acorn, easily being the weight of two or three of the usual acorns. This squash did not have the typical yellow flesh of acorns. It's flesh was pale orange and thick, not very fibrous. Made excellent pie, used half acorn and half buttercup for the filling. Turned out perfect. Probably the best acorn we've got so far and will look forward to more next year.
The squash may have been a Reno based on the thickness and colour of the raw flesh. -2017
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Yellow flesh. Seeds are small and unique round shape, delicious when toasted. Squash does not make liquid when baking. Got about 1/4 c of squash juice from the seed cavity of one squash.
May 2018
July 2018
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apr 05, 2018: Just had a big slice of fresh pumpkin pie made with 2/3 of a kabocha and a large slice of fairytale pumpkin. Wow, was that ever different from the last pie made with butternut and kabocha.
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A stem bearing a pumpkin is also known as the peduncle; inside this stem attaching the fruit to the plant can be edible. Winter squash Maxima species that we tested such as Buttercup have soft green inside the peduncle for months after harvest and is not just edible but downright tasty when baked. Moschata stems dry out very quickly and become extremely hard, leaving no green inside at all. These are like sticks of wood and not edible. Most Pepos we've tested have dried-out woody stems too.
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Bought the smallest Honeynut at the store around September 29th, 2018. Baked it the next day and ate it out of the shell with salmon. The flesh was dark, dry, fine-grained and thick like a kabocha or buttercup. Not much at all like a butternut. Very interesting squash considering it's a hybrid of buttercup and butternut. This squash was very sweet, and very tasty. Exactly the rich flavour that goes with salmon. Not much of a real "squashy" taste.
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Used Butternut for years and this squash we picked up was different than any other. It arrived cut in half, meaning they had cut our a bad bit and put it on sale for $1.27, a great deal for two squash's worth. We sliced off a few 2 cm thick round and fried them in a pan with butter. Our favourite way to eat Butternut, after all these years of enjoying it in spicy dishes, is the simplest. Eager to eat our butter-soaked toasty-brown squash, we took a bite. It was so bland it turned us off completely. We gave the rst of our cooked squash slices to the cat, who ate them eagerly. The only thing worth doing with bland squash is to make brownies, so we did. When we cut the squash to bake it we could see the Butternut had started to go white in the middle, indicating that it's old. I would guess between 6 months to a year old. The outside was unblemished and an even tone, still gorgeous. We baked this squash until it was soft. The smell from the oven was of butter roasting, unusual from other times we baked a Butternut. We took the squash out when it was done and still warm, it smelled of a Fairytale pumpkin which was a real surprise as we never smelled that from a Butternut before. The smell is a slight citrusy, very strongly raspberry smell; One that might be similar to baking a raspberry sour cream pie. We will report if our next Butternut smells like raspberry when baked. |
August 10th, 2018: a new shipment of squash has arrived here in Toronto at Sweet Potato. These squash are so new the stems are green and fresh. Today we found a new squash we'd never seen before - a Swan White acorn. They had several of them, a few of them were impressive size. The largest was as big as your head. I weighed it - it said 3 lbs. We think it might not have been accurate, the squash might have been 4 or almost 5 lbs. It was the same size as some of the medium-sized buttercups. As you could see in the photo, the Swan Whites were larger than the green acorns. We looked up the PLU of this squash: #94752 by Healthy Organic Produce Enterprises (HOPE). The 9 and 5 digits mean the squash is grown organically, which is pretty impressive considering the damage Vine Borers have done to our crop. The farm it's from is actually a community of 30+ farmers in Aylmer, Ontario, between London and Detroit. Oh yeah, and they are Amish. What an honour to get first pick of a unique squash grown by dedicated farmers!
These creamy white acorns were so fresh that they hadn't changed color much at all to the pale tan-yellow color. We don't know how much tan is acheived after the curing process, so it would be nice to get the whitest, freshest acorn and a tanned one and compare. For now we got one that was just starting to show a creamy tan colour on the top. A truly beautiful squash, and the skin has an exceptionally smooth texture unlike other varieties.
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We had read disappointing reviews about the taste of Baby Boo, but we saw some at the store and got them to eat. We were pleasantly surprised by the taste, nutty like chestnut and creamy like artichoke. They turned out to be wonderful to eat.
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Bought a buttercup squash in fall 2017. It was a green coloured cup with the characteristic turban sticking out, light green with broken dark green stripes and a patch turning yellow-orange on one side. We had originally thought it was a Turban squash. It looked very similar to a buttercup with an actual cup. The seeds set it apart from any kabocha we bought though, almost twice as large and flat and pointed on both ends. Very thick seeds. We waited a month or two to open it, thinking curing would do it good for the flavour. It turns out that the warts on it were a sign that it's going bad. The warty area had dry flesh turning white. With a closer look some of the warts were too flat to be warts, appearing as flat grey patches. The rest of the flesh was divine. A unique colour, no strings and thick. The best squash flesh we ever tasted. Bonus: After baking, the stem fell off revealing a pretty little green star inside the rough bark layer on the end. We took a small knife and knicked a piece of the green inside of the stem. It was soft like cutting into a half-boiled potato. The taste: Amazing. Imagine a fresh green sweet pea sprout but with less chlorophyll taste mixed with biting into fresh buttery baked dough, with a slight sweetness. The stem tastes better than donuts. We will definitely be tasting more C. maxima stems in the future. -2017 |
We had a real turban squash for the first time. It's flavour is very different that other turban-shaped squash. It may be one of the most delicately flavoured squash, in fact. This is especially unique considering turban-shaped squash such as Buttercup usually have intense, sweet flavour.
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