Had heard a lot about spaghetti squash but I had never cooked one before. Better still this spaghetti squash was picked from the garden and then cooked instantly, can’t get much fresher than that! One thing I should point out at this stage is that this squash was a fairly ‘wet’ squash, possible due to the type, normally they are not as wet as this. Additionally the skin was so tough and thick on this one that I had to use a saw to cut it in half, no knife could cut it! Anyway this is how you can prepare a spaghetti squash, this one weighed around 2.5kg (approximately 4 lbs) which is fairly big so cooking time will vary depending on the size of your squash.

Spaghetti Squash

Preparation to Plate: 1½ hours

Serves 2-6 People

Keep Refrigerated

Consume within 3 days

Ingredients:

1 Spaghetti Squash

Recipe:

Preheat your oven to 180°C. Cut your spaghetti squash in half, down the middle (using a strong sharp knife or a saw depending on how tough it is). Scoop out the pulp in the middle and put it to one side (as a side note you can keep the seeds and roast them to use in the future if you really want to).

Place the squash flesh side down on a baking tray or on the wire shelf of the oven and roast for 45 minutes. As I said, this is the amount of time it took for my squash to cook, times may be less than this however. Once cooked remove from the oven and place flesh side up, you should already be able to see the ‘spaghetti strands’.

Using a fork carefully scrape out the strands and place them into a bowel or colander (I had to place mine in a colander as they needed to have some of the water removed from them. It is best to follow the direction of the strands when scraping out the flesh to ensure that it doesn’t clump together. Oddly enough I found that the strands in the middle were horizontal where as the other strands were vertical. If you’re spaghetti squash looks fairly dry and spaghetti-like then you don’t need to follow the next few steps, simply plate and serve.

Additional Step:

If you squash is fairly wet then you need to drain the water from it, especially if you’re going to add these to another dish as a ‘pasta replacement’. I simply put a trivet on top of the squash followed by a saucepan with heady rocks (feel free to substitute as needed). Again I stress this step is not always necessary, it depends on your squash.

But as you can see there was a lot of water coming out even when I had just put the saucepan on top.

I left the squash like this for about 30 minutes and then used a fork on it again before serving.