Vegetables
Squash
Dense and sweet, and it wants smaller pieces than people cut.
What it does in fast-moving hot air
Butternut and its relatives are dense, starchy and high in sugar, so they behave like a slower, sweeter carrot. Heat penetration is the constraint and it scales badly with size, while the sugar means the outside caramelises long before a large chunk is soft in the middle. The flesh holds its shape well until it suddenly does not, so the gap between firm and collapsing is narrow at the end.
Why the cut matters
One chart prints about twelve minutes at 200°C for half-inch chunks, and does not say fresh or frozen. The published dimension is the important part of that sentence: doubling the chunk size does considerably more than doubling the time.
Cooking pages
- Squash chunks — Fresh butternut squash in 2.5cm pieces gets sixteen to twenty-five minutes at 200°C in one manufacturer's charts for two machines; two other figures name no state.
This page gives no cooking answer of its own. A food does not have one — a cut, at a thickness, in a state, at a loading, in a particular appliance does. Any figure mentioned above is one manufacturer’s, and the page for the cut says which machine, quantity and state it was printed for, or that the manufacturer named no state.