Nutrition
| Per 100 g | Per 1 oz (28 g) | |
|---|---|---|
| Energy | 298 kcal | 84 kcal |
| Protein | 6.6 g | 1.9 g |
| Fat | 0.7 g | 0.2 g |
| saturated | 0.1 g | 0 g |
| Carbohydrate | 64.2 g | 18.2 g |
| sugars | 14.6 g | 4.1 g |
| Fibre | 13.2 g | 3.8 g |
| Sodium | 26 mg | 8 mg |
Estimated from the ingredients, for the finished dried product. Actual values vary with the produce you use and how far you dry it.
Ingredients
- 2.4 kg butternut squash
Instructions
- Halve the squash and scoop out the seed cavity first, then peel. Peeling a whole butternut is a fight; peeling a stable half is not.
- Keep the neck and the bulb separate as you cut. The neck is solid flesh and the bulb is thinner walled around the cavity, so they finish at different times if they share a tray.
- Cut into cubes or batons of a single size. Mixed shapes look good going in and guarantee that half the batch is overdone.
- Boil the pieces until a fork meets only slight resistance, around seven or eight minutes. Raw butternut is so dense that drying it untreated gives you gravel that never rehydrates.
- Drain them and leave them to steam off for a few minutes. Surface water on hot squash carries sugar with it, and that sugar is what glues pieces to the tray.
- Arrange them in one layer with no piece resting on another. Cooked squash is tacky and will bond wherever it touches.
- Dry at 57 °C for about 9 hours. The colour deepens from pale orange towards apricot, and a piece that has gone translucent is close.
- Done means hard and light, with no give at all when a cold piece is squeezed between finger and thumb. Because it was cooked first, an under-dried piece spoils rather than simply being chewy.
- Condition the jar for a week, shaking it each day, then store it dark for a year. Butternuts vary enormously in water content from one to the next, which makes this one of the batches most worth conditioning.
