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Make Squash Great Again with Paul McComiskey

New ideas for winter squash at Ocean House

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“A lot of chefs say fall is their favorite season to cook, but I prefer late winter,” says Chef Paul McComisky, director of culinary education at Ocean House, the tony resort in Watch Hill. “It’s a challenge. If you’re doing farm to table you kind of have to regress,” to earlier ways of thinking about food, he says. “They really had to think ahead.” Homesteaders would spend summer canning and fall shoring up hearty foods so that they had food to eat for winter, and that’s how Chef Paul thinks about winter food, too – using the harvest from the previous year to make sure he can still eat as locally as possible, even outside of the growing season. A big part of winter food 100 years ago was winter squash, and it’s a big part of winter food at Ocean House, where the chefs make it a priority to serve food from local purveyors and to cook with the seasons. It’s such a big priority, in fact, that Chef Paul is also the hotel’s food forager, meaning that he goes to farms all over New England to get food for the restaurants at Ocean House. “It’s a little bit of me playing Match.com between chefs and farmers,” he says. At the beginning of strawberry season, he’ll select berries from five different farms, then bring them back to the pastry chef for her to pick which she wants for certain desserts.

Chef Paul also teaches several culinary classes per week, both for guests of the hotel and to the public. This day, we’re here for a Winter Squash class, set in a tucked away space called The Center for Wine and Culinary Arts. It looks like the set of a cooking show, and it’s also home to an 8,000 bottle wine cellar, which Chef Paul let me look inside with the promise that I wouldn’t break anything. “The whole idea of having a hotel school is to make the food and wine approachable to guests,” he says. I’m particularly excited about this class, because I know two ways to make squash, and neither of them excite me all that much. The mistake most people make, Chef Paul says as he splits a spaghetti squash in two, is boiling the gourds. They already have a high water content to survive being off the vine all winter, so boiling them adds unnecessary water and dilutes the flavor. Check. That’s exactly why I skip the butternut squash puree at Thanksgiving dinner. Instead, he suggests, roast it with some butter, olive oil and apple cider, then use that juice as your liquid when you puree it. I’m still a little dubious when he hands me a poached apple that’s been hollowed out and filled with the squash, but not after I take a bite. It’s easily the brightest, best flavor I’ve tasted from a squash. I immediately start putting together a dinner party menu around the side dish, asking Chef Paul for a vegan modification (which is as simple as subbing out the butter for oil).

He then takes us through a handful of different varieties of squash, like red curry, sugar dumpling, blue hubbard and delicata, which he sourced from farms in Connecticut and Rhode Island. His favorite is blue hubbard. “If pumpkins have the least flavor of the squash family, blue hubbard has the most,” he says. The pastry chef used it for squash ice cream all last winter, which they would run out of every week. Chef Paul shows us recipes for a Ginger Squash Soup and Spaghetti Squash Latkes, in addition to those Poached Apples with Squash Puree. They’re all perfectly in season, and totally different than anything I’ve had before. The next day, I went to a farm and bought a 15lb blue hubbard squash to make soup for the coming winter. Eating with the seasons, indeed. Ocean House has a Savory to Sweet class on November 5, a Thanksgiving Leftovers class on November 26 and a Cocktails and Hors d’Oeuvres class on December 15.

OceanHouseEvents.com

ocean house, the ocean house, ocean house ri, rhode island, squash, winter squash, red curry, sugar dumpling, blue hubbard, ginger squash soup, latkes, cocktails

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