Squash Blossoms
Our seed stories usually focus on specific varieties of vegetables and grains. This month, we bring you an unsung hero of the home garden: squash blossoms! Squash blossoms are a summer garden delicacy that you cannot buy at the typical grocery store.
Squash plants have separate male and female flowers. Female flowers are the ones that turn into the squash fruits, while the males exist solely for pollination. The female flowers can be differentiated by the immature squash fruit (the ovary) at the base of the flower that looks like a miniature version of the mature squash. These can be up to golf ball size!
Squash flowers open for just one day. In that day, bees clear out the male blossoms of large amount of pollen they produce. If there are a lot of bees around, the flowers will be empty by late morning. After that, the flowers wilt and fall off. If, however, you pick them, they make a wonderful ingredient for summer meals. Squash blossoms will last up to a week in the fridge. We recommend that you don’t wash them before using—they quite delicate and are hard to fully dry. If you’re picking early in the morning from your squash patch, you can leave some male flowers on the plants for pollination. But in a large squash patch, there are usually more than enough male flowers to do the job.
Our favorite ways to cook squash blossoms is to batter and fry them in a simple tempura-style batter (eggs, flour, and a tiny bit of water). Some people like to stuff them with a mixture of cheese, garlic, and herbs before battering and frying!
If you’re growing winter squash, you may also like to try another late-summer delicacy: squash vine tips. Late in the season when you want to discourage more leaf growth, you can prune back the last foot or so of your squash vines and steam them up. The vines can taste just like squash blossoms, and are an ingredient in village recipes from China and Southeast Asia. Different squash species will have different textures and flavors.