Summer squash sauce is what I make when tomato sauce feels wrong and a cream sauce feels too heavy. Four or five yellow squash get cooked down in butter and olive oil, then blended with fresh basil, garlic, lemon, and parmesan into something light enough for a hot night and rich enough to carry a plate of pasta on its own. There is no cream in it anywhere, and it still comes out creamy.
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Cooking the water out of the squash before it goes anywhere near the blender is what separates this from a thin green puree. Once the squash is reduced and caramelized, the oil, the squash, and the parmesan emulsify into a sauce that behaves like cream without being cream.
- Yellow summer squash and zucchini both work, they taste a little different from each other, and blending the two together is fine.
- Half butter and half olive oil is the fat: the butter browns the squash, the oil carries into the emulsion afterward.
- A tablespoon of minced garlic goes in the pan, and more goes in raw at the blender if you want the bite.
- Sweet Hungarian and Gypsy peppers are the optional add that gives the sauce more body.
- The finished puree works as a pasta sauce, a burger sauce, or a stand-in for hollandaise on eggs benedict.
- This Squash Sauce Can Be Made With Yellow Squash or Zucchini - Both Are Delicious!
- Summer Means Easy Access To Garden Fresh Ingredients That Make This A Special Treat
- Cooking The Squash Down In Butter And Olive Oil Makes The Sauce Thicker And Less Watery
- Add Sweet Peppers and Other Garden Goodies For More Body
- Into The Blender With Basil, Lemon, And Parmesan
- Not Just "Pasta" Sauce!
- This Is A Literal Taste Of Summer On Your Plate
This started life as a zucchini sauce. I came across the recipe, liked the idea of it, then got to the kitchen and did not have enough zucchini, so summer squash went in instead. It came out different from the original, and it is the version I have kept making. The squash came from Sadowski's Produce, the family market out on Airport Highway in Swanton, west of Toledo, because my own squash did not take this year. The basil and the peppers came out of the backyard vegetable garden, which had a much better season than the squash bed did.
This Squash Sauce Can Be Made With Yellow Squash or Zucchini - Both Are Delicious!
Summer squash and zucchini are close enough that the recipe does not care which one you hand it. Yellow squash - crookneck or straight-neck - runs milder and a little sweeter. Zucchini brings more of everything: more flavor, more green. If you have both sitting on the counter, blend them together and split the difference.
A yellow squash sauce does not come out yellow. It lands on a pale green with a warm cast to it, because almost all of the color in the bowl comes from the basil rather than from the vegetable. The zucchini version reads greener for the same reason, plus the skins. Neither one looks like anything you would buy in a jar, which I count in its favor.
Summer Means Easy Access To Garden Fresh Ingredients That Make This A Special Treat
These amounts are a starting point rather than a rule. The recipe scales with whatever the garden or the market gave you, and every line below moves to taste. A batch built on four or five squash cooks down to a full Blendtec jar of sauce, which is more than one dinner is going to use.
- 4 to 5 summer squash, chopped into rough chunks
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 2 tablespoons olive oil for the pan, plus another pour at the blender
- 1 tablespoon minced garlic, plus more raw for the blender
- Fresh cracked black pepper, in the pan and again in the blender
- Salt, sparingly
- A packed cup of fresh basil
- The juice of half a lemon
- About half a cup of grated parmesan
- Optional: three or four sweet Hungarian or Gypsy peppers
Cooking The Squash Down In Butter And Olive Oil Makes The Sauce Thicker And Less Watery
Get the chopped squash into a pan with equal parts butter and good olive oil over medium heat. The butter is there for flavor and browning; the oil is what the finished sauce gets its body from. Add the minced garlic, plenty of cracked pepper, and a light hand of salt.
Then leave it alone longer than feels necessary. Summer squash is mostly water, and that water has to leave before anything good happens to it. As it cooks off the sugars concentrate, the cut edges start to caramelize, and the pan goes from a pile of pale chunks to something that smells like dinner. Rush this step and you get a watery puree that no amount of cheese will rescue.
Add Sweet Peppers and Other Garden Goodies For More Body
The optional addition worth trying is sweet peppers. This batch got Hungarian and Gypsy peppers out of the garden - pale green, sweet rather than hot - chopped and dropped in alongside the squash so they soften in the same pan. They give the sauce more substance and a little more to chew on in something that can otherwise read as delicate.
Check which pepper you have before it goes in. Hungarian wax peppers come in a sweet strain and a hot one, they look close enough on a market table that the wrong bag is easy to grab, and only the sweet version belongs here. Put a hot one in and the blender carries that heat evenly through every bite of the batch.
Into The Blender With Basil, Lemon, And Parmesan
When the squash is soft and reduced, everything goes into the blender - the squash and every bit of fat left in the pan, a packed cup of basil, more black pepper, more raw garlic if you want the bite, the juice of half a lemon, the parmesan, and another pour of olive oil. Run it until it is smooth.
What comes out is an emulsion. The oil, the water still held in the squash, and the fat in the cheese come together under the blades. That is where the texture comes from - it is doing the job a roux or a cup of heavy cream would normally be doing. It sits lighter than an alfredo and still coats a noodle.
That second pour of olive oil is what gives the emulsion enough fat to hold onto. A reduced pan does not always leave enough behind on its own. Adding the oil at the blender rather than the stove also keeps it out of the caramelizing step, where it would only have cooked off.
The basil is what keeps it from tasting like blended vegetables. Use more than looks reasonable. It gives the sauce a fresh pop that plays against the lemon and the black pepper, and fresh is not optional here - dried basil is a different ingredient with a different job.
Not Just "Pasta" Sauce!
Pasta is the obvious one, and there are two ways to play it. Pour the puree back into the pan with another round of chopped squash, give it a couple of minutes, and serve it over pasta so the sauce has some texture in it. Or leave it as a straight puree and treat it the way you would any other sauce.
Eggs Benedict is the one worth calling out. It goes over the top in place of hollandaise at brunch, which is less work and a lot less butter.
Married life came with a father-in-law, and Jim liked it enough to want it on a burger. He is not wrong - it is a better condiment than most of what is living in the refrigerator door.
If there are buddies in the backyard and burgers on the grill, which is most of August around here in northwest Ohio, it belongs on the table next to the ketchup. It is also a lighter thing to be eating than what it replaces - squash is mostly water with a decent hit of vitamin C and potassium, and the fat in the bowl is mostly olive oil rather than cream - which is not why I make it, but it does not hurt.
This Is A Literal Taste Of Summer On Your Plate
The reason this tastes like summer is that everything in it peaks at the same time. Summer squash, basil, and sweet peppers all hit their few good weeks together, so the combination is not something anyone had to engineer.
That is also why the squash matters more than anything else on the list. Small to medium, firm, heavy for its size, used within a couple of days of coming off the plant or the market table. Build the same recipe in February out of a supermarket squash that rode a truck across the country and a jar of dried basil, and you get something that follows the instructions exactly and tastes like nothing in particular.
So make the full jar while the making is good. Pasta is the easy answer, and if the sauce comes out tighter than you want on it, loosen it with a ladle of the starchy pasta water rather than more oil - it thins the sauce without thinning the flavor, and the starch gives it something to hold onto the noodles with. The rest of the jar is what turns the next few breakfasts and burgers into something better than they were going to be.