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
Squash comes out at about twelve minutes at 200°C for half-inch chunks. 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 — Half-inch chunks, twelve minutes at 200°C. The cut size is the whole instruction.
There is deliberately no cooking time on this page. A food does not have one — a cut, at a thickness, in a state, at a loading, in a particular appliance does. That is what the pages above are for.