Can you deglaze roasted butternut squash?

October 29, 2017 8:16 AM

Can you deglaze the dish you roasted butternut squash in? Will this yield delicious caremalised squash-stock? Or bitter carbon-y unpleasantness?

I've roasted a squash and tried deglazing the pan with vegetable stock.

The result was black. It smelled/tasted of the vegetable stock I delgazed with, but was incredibly unappetising to look at.

Since I didn't want to risk ruining the colour of a whole batch of soup for questionable/nil flavour gains, I chucked it.

But, for future reference, can anyone vouch for deglazing after roast butternut squash?

posted by Lorc to Food & Drink (10 answers total)

Yeah, the sugar content of the squash is so high you're likely to get the same result you got (at best).

I'd file it as "maybe possible but not worth it."
posted by guster4lovers at 8:27 AM on October 29, 2017 [1 favorite]

Why not just taste it? Also, a lot of the time, a bit of 'burned' flavor can go a long way towards making a more complex (i.e. delicious and yummy) flavor profile in a dish. (This is why when a dish calls for mushrooms, I usually use a combination of fresh and dried mushrooms...they're really like two different ingredients)
posted by sexyrobot at 8:35 AM on October 29, 2017 [3 favorites]

Agree w/Guster4Lovers -- sugar content almost always leaves a burny residue when roasting squash (sweet potatoes have the same problem.) It's possible if you took it out much earlier, you could do it, but then the squash itself probably wouldn't be good.

If you wanted the flavor in a soup, you could puree a few nicely colored cubes of roasted squash.

Blackened usually means bitter when sugar is involved.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 8:47 AM on October 29, 2017 [5 favorites]

Squash is wonderful deeply caramelized, but it goes beyond that quite quickly to acrid-burned. If the bits are black, I would absolutely not deglaze it.

Next time, try roasting small cubes or slices of squash (well-oiled and salted of course) on parchment paper on a good heavy half sheet pan (a flimsy pan will not get you good results: I've tried.) It gets wonderfully browned but the parchment paper renders it less likely to burn AND very little of the caramelly goodness gets left behind. (Edit - I also sometimes use a silpat, but the silpat seems to insulate it a bit more than I like. It's still much better than nothing if you don't have parchment paper.)
posted by fingersandtoes at 9:23 AM on October 29, 2017 [3 favorites]

You can deglaze after roasting squash, the trick is to put water in the bottom of the roasting dish. Or for fun put water and a sweet white wine in there.
posted by Oyéah at 10:19 AM on October 29, 2017

It would be worthwhile to try putting squash on a rack to roast it, and put some stock and wine in the pan under it.
posted by theora55 at 11:07 AM on October 29, 2017

Yeah, I've never deglazed squash specifically, but I think you'll have more success using some kind of booze -- a liberal pour of wine, beer, or a dark bourbon would be super tasty. Even vodka would probs work in a pinch -- but in that case, don't use much, just enough to get the crud off the pan!
posted by functionequalsform at 2:19 PM on October 29, 2017

Deglaze (ideally with wine, stock , or depending on what you're making--apple cider), taste, then decide if it will be useful. Perhaps you wouldn't be able to use the entire pan's worth, but maybe a few table spoons stirred in would add depth to your soup? A touch of bitterness can add a welcome complexity to a dish--it's part of the point of caramelizing sugar. The deeper you caramelize, the further you end up in bitter territory, but it's the balance of sweet & bitter that makers caramelized sugar so much more delicious than plan sugar.
posted by carrioncomfort at 7:30 AM on October 30, 2017

When I roast tomatoes, I have to pull them out of the oven a couple times during the process to turn them. I pour off the liquid that pools in the pan each time I turn, otherwise it does the same thing you mention--it just pools and blackens and is unusable.

The roast tomato liquid is so tasty that I'd be tempted to try this approach with squash. I don't know why I've never thought to try this!
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 12:28 PM on October 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

Two tbs of butter and two of flour and a little stock and you have blackened squash roux that you can toss pasta in the next night.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 3:30 PM on October 30, 2017