Squash Blossoms
- Gargoyle
- Sep 8, 2023
- 3 min read
For approximately two weeks in the early summer your local farmer's market might sell a small pricy container of large yellow flowers. If you are a Gargoyle you just might squeal in delight and pounce a box protectively before another aficionado gets their grubby hands on it first.
Stuffing the squash blossoms is probably the fiddliest, most annoying piece of cookery that the Gargoyle is willing to undertake, and the result is oh so worth it.
The entire flower is edible. Discard any obviously wilted icky parts. Some sources say to remove pistils, stamens or even stem ends. Never bothered. Haven't died yet. Never found a variance of flavor due to presence of pistils and stamens. Stems are tasty.
The leaves are delicate and get more so as time passes. Week-old squash blossoms still taste good but are much harder to work with than day-old ones.
Rinse them carefully, and tease each one open and gently stuff it full of cheese of your choice. If you do not have a long-standing feud with piping bags, maybe use one of those; here we find a small spoon is easiest. If the flower rips, still stuff it, fold some leaves over and pretend you totally meant that, just be aware of any escaping cheese in subsequent steps. In fact some methodologies say to tear the flowers open into little wraps, which seems like more work, but you're totally validated if that is how you roll.
Cheese-wise, ricotta is the most traditional. Goat cheese works beautifully. A 50-50 blend of ricotta with oaxaca (often used in quesadillas) was just about perfect; ricotta and shredded mozzarella would be great too.
Add herbs to taste, probably most favorably in Italian direction. If your cheese is not already salty, add salt.
Adding a crunchy component to the stuffing mixture might work, too, but the one foray into that was less than perfectly successful. More on that at the end as bonus content with the warning that you might regret it.
In general we try to avoid breaded things for health and laziness reasons, but even a small bit of extra crunch goes a long way. Hence, the minimalist breadcrumbs:
In one bowl crack an egg or two, beat until the eggs are mostly uniform.
In the second bowl, combine breadcrumbs with seasoning of your choice. Definitely salt, possibly some herbs.
Coat each squash with egg and then dip into breadcrumb without obsessing over excessive coverage. Uncovered parts are tasty too.
Place in air fryer in a single layer. Cook at 350 for about 10 minutes, flipping halfway.
For species not made largely of rocks, resist the temptation to bite into one as you take it out of the air fryer: the cheese is lava. Tasty, tasty lava.
But it is not the approximately 15 minutes in early July, you say, how ever shall I enjoy these amazing treats without waiting a whole year? Well, you can't, but then again in a way you can if you're fortunate enough to have a well-stocked purveyor of Mexican groceries who just might have jars of squash blossoms in brine.
Obviously it's not the same. The main flavor element of the brined squash blossoms in the brine. The squash-ness and floral-ness are still present, but now transformed and salty and bright. The texture is different too, obviously. They are soggy and squishy and tentacly yet still delicate.
The canonical application for them is inside a quesadilla.
They also work really well chopped into cold pasta dishes or on top of a pizza. Which is to say they are especially fantastic paired with cheese in any context that asks for salty things.
Bonus content: when a bug is a feature.
(Trying to do a spoiler cut type thing here, such that the thingy is closed and needs to be clicked on to view.)
Warning: here there be insects
If one is unfortunate enough to live in a 17 year cicada area, some intrepid adventurers will gather and cook and eat them. The Gargoyle is emphatically not one of them (and will not be sharing any photos, because shudder!), but the Gargoyle's Favorite Alien explored the possibilities and treated friends to a feast of the critters at various ages and prepared in various ways.
They're supposed to taste shrimp-like; we were surprised by the distinct asparagus note. The younger stages are textured a bit like soft-shell crabs or shell-on shrimp, which really isn't that bad at all; the adults are crunchier because harder shells and legs. Also, if allowed to sit in booze for a few days they will lend interesting complexity to the beverage.
Well, during the feast we had some squash blossoms on hand, so we popped a blanched cicada into each, added ricotta and toasted in a toaster oven.
Verdict: a single crunchy thing in a squash blossom just gets lost, and the surprise of encountering it may or may not delight, but one can easily extrapolate that if each bite had small crunchy things it'd be far more pleasant.
No further research has yet been conducted to determine what would produce the most satisfying crunch. In this preparation the cicada-ness was regrettably not well-highlighted either, making the main appeal of the dish the ability to declare that one has eaten a cicada-ricotta squash blossom.
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