Kabocha Squash Brown Butter Tea Cookies – Gluten Free
Kabocha cookies that don’t taste like pumpkin pie? I have a bias when it comes to pumpkin or squash desserts, and it’s this: I don’t …
What we call pumpkin is a kind of winter squash, bred to be big and round and easily cut for Halloween by small children wielding sharp objects. My apologies, though, if you live in Australia and have been very confused by this website up to this point! There, pumpkin is a generic term for all winter squashes, and squash is the word for a sweetened citrus drink. To further muddy the pumpkin issue, you can visit certain Thai or Indian restaurants and enjoy a pumpkin curry, which will almost always be made from kabocha or red kuri squash, not from a big round jack-o-lantern thingy.
Decorative pumpkins are usually of the C. pepo type–the same species as zucchini and acorn squash–but bred exclusively for shape, color, and harvest yield, with no regard for flavor. Halloween pumpkins taste pretty much like a hard and bland zucchini (blech!). Pumpkins sold as pie pumpkins are usually not great either; they will almost always make an inferior-tasting pumpkin pie in comparison to baking the same pie with butternut squash. Both will taste exactly like your spice jar smells, and like brown sugar and custard, but the squash pie will taste more like pumpkin than will the pumpkin pie. Don’t believe me? Try baking one of each and let me know what you think.
Starbucks’ iconic pumpkin spice latte does contain some vegetable matter in it, not only spices and flavorings. In 2015, a small amount of pumpkin puree was added to the Starbucks PSL for the first time, largely in response to demand of consumers and food bloggers who delighted in pointing out the lack of pumpkin on the drink’s ingredient list.
But according to the website of Popular Science magazine, pumpkin puree doesn’t even contain pumpkin, it’s made from squashes like butternut and hubbard.
This is no scandal: the law clearly states pumpkin doesn’t have to be pumpkin. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is the agency that serves as our food labeling police here in the USA. FDA policy section 585.725, last affirmed in 1988, is titled: “Pumpkin” – Labeling Articles Made from Certain Varieties of Squash. This ruling declares, in essence, that since 1938, we’ve allowed you to make pumpkin taste good, and we aren’t stopping now. We won’t come after you if you print a label with pretty pumpkin pictures on it, then fill the can with something else.
Specifically, says the FDA, you can fill a pumpkin can with “. . . golden-fleshed, sweet squash (Cucurbita maxima), or mixtures of such squash with field pumpkins. In the absence of any evidence that this designation misleads or deceives consumers we see no reason to change the policy.”
Digging deep into pumpkin history, you can find exceptions to the blandness. ‘Winter Luxury’ is an heirloom (1893) pumpkin variety that grows 6 pound classic pumpkin fruits but with a silvery-white netting. I’ve not tried it, but multiple seed sellers show it tops in blind taste tests, and, more importantly, my friend Erica Rudloff in Maine says it is delicious.
So, are pumpkins squash? Yes! But mostly not squash that you’d actually want to eat.
Kabocha cookies that don’t taste like pumpkin pie? I have a bias when it comes to pumpkin or squash desserts, and it’s this: I don’t …
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