Recipe: Purée de Calabaza

I love purée de calabaza. In English, puréed squash, but because I ate it here first, it will always be calabaza to me, just like chard will always be acelga. Calabaza is a subtle, healthy side to a rich chorizo but can also be buttery and light as the top half of a squash and chard tarta (essentially a vegetable pie).

When I leave Argentina, I want to be able to make at least a few of the foods I love eating here, so with that in mind, I want to start doing a little bit more Argentine cooking in my rather small kitchen. Today, I made an impulse buy on the walk home. A small, saran wrapped package of cubed calabaza. I asked the vendor how you cook it and he looked at me like I was insane. “You boil it,” he told me.

“And?” I asked.

“You boil it. Then crush it into a pulp.”

With that sage advice in mind, I went home and cooked!

Step 1: Buy calabaza. You can get them at any vegetable vender in a few different forms. I bought the calabaza already chopped into easily boiled cubes for a peso and a half. They also sell them in flat, round disks, or, if you are truly ambitious, you can buy an entire calabaza. The pre-cut calabaza is the color of cantaloupe. The whole one has a slightly whiter, very hard shell that you will need a good knife to cut off. If you buy the whole calabaza, you will need to de-seed it.

Step 2: Boil it. Simple. Drop the pieces of calabaza into boiling, already well salted water and let it sit. Using calabaza cubes, I let mine boil for fifteen minutes, and could have left it a bit longer. When you think your calabaza is done, scoop one piece out with a spoon and trying crushing it. If it breaks apart easily, you are ready for step three.

Step 3: Strain it. Using whatever you use to strain pasta (since admit it, if you need to read how to make calabaza purée, you, like me, probably eat a lot of pasta), separate the water and the calabaza. Then, crush it in the strainer, letting the excess water go down the drain.

Step 4: Add salt, butter, oil, spices—whatever you like! Now you can eat it alone, as a side to a main dish, inside an empanada, or as one layer of a vegetable tarta.

As you can see, my calabaza is a side to a rice empanada and some grilled peppers. Delicious!

I am easily excited by my culinary successes.