How I Cooked 10 Pounds Of Zucchini

hello i'm andrew and welcome to my kitchen in this video you're gonna see me cook a lot of zucchini and that's because recently on the channel i've been making these videos where i cook a large amount of one ingredient and it started as a fun challenge to use up a surplus of potatoes that i had but what surprised me is that it was a very fun experience and it taught me a lot of intricacies of these ingredients that i had overlooked previously and so i wanted to try a bunch of recipes that i was either not super familiar with or had never made before to try to better understand this vegetable and i know in previous videos i've done 20 25 pounds but here's the thing zucchini weighs less the first dish is colloquis which are greek zucchini fritters this is a dish i actually have some familiarity with my partner is greek she introduced me to this dish initially and i've seen her and her family make it numerous times but i've never really dug in myself to learn it so it begins by grating zucchini on a box grater zucchini holds a tremendous amount of water when i slice the tips and ends off the zucchini there is immediately moisture beating on the cut side so even just a couple minutes sitting with salt there's already a ton of moisture coming out of this zucchini really the best technique is to get a clean dish towel and then wring it very tightly to release as much moisture as possible excess moisture is going to make it very difficult to hold the fritters together while frying next you're combining it with the rest of the ingredients i finally sliced three spring onions next there's herbs dill mint and basil i personally really love what happens when a bunch of different herbs are combined together then there's crumbled feta so then there are the binders eggs and flour i add the eggs first and mix the mixture very well because kind of like in baking these are essentially all of the wet ingredients and then the flour is just enough to hold it together so it really just comes down to the moisture level of the other ingredients on the day that you're making this i think my first couple fritters were a little loose so i added some more flour i think also with fritters your first one is never going to be the good one but by that you know third fourth fifth fritter you'd have things dialed in and they were coming out nicely this has become honestly one of my favorite foods i just love the transformation that this vegetable takes into this fried but really fresh tasting thing and there's some unique things happening where the ingredients on the outside of the fritter becoming caramelized and fried while the inside is still very tender and fresh tasting the next recipe i tried was focaccia with a zucchini topping and i followed samin nostrat's focaccia recipe and then sort of made up the zucchini topping myself i began by measuring honey in a large bowl by weight and i did this so that i could then pour warm water over the honey to fully dissolve it because this is going to be used to then bloom the yeast which needs the sugar from the honey to come alive in a separate bowl i combined salt and flour and then once i saw that my yeast was doing something then i added the water with the yeast and the honey to the flour and salt as well as olive oil so i mixed this until it was just combined making sure not to overwork it and then this rests for 12 hours the next day with my dough fully risen i prepared a large baking sheet with olive oil and then turned the dough out into it then i dimpled the dough with my fingers and then poured over a salt and water brine the dough then proofs for another 45 minutes so meanwhile i prepared the zucchini i mandolin it sort of medium thin it's tricky with zucchini because it can lose so much volume so then i salted the zucchini let it sit for a moment and then i spread out all the slices on a wire rack so that it could release as much moisture as possible i took my dried zucchini and i stole some oil from the edge of the focaccia to just toss the zucchini in i also added some thyme and for the top of the zucchini i just sort of made it up kind of tried to do a random pattern while keeping it evenly covered and i did some with twists and folds because i wanted to test what the outcome would be later on lastly there's a sprinkling of flaky sea salt then when it's out of the oven another drizzle of oil i let it cool for a moment then it was time to invert it and i was very pleased to see that the bottom had a rich even golden crunchy bottom of the bread from a flavor standpoint the focaccia was very interesting the dominant flavors are salts in the olive oil which is delicious and the zucchini becomes so dehydrated that it's almost more like an herb at this point than it is a vegetable but overall it was very good i mean the base focaccia recipe is tremendous it's a can't lose situation the next dish i tried was a boiled zucchini salad with tuna and this recipe comes from lydia bastianich you can find it on her website this is a recipe i was not expecting to find but as soon as i saw it i was very excited because the first step you just boil a whole zucchini which just feels like a refreshingly efficient and straightforward way to prepare something and the goal here is to just get it tender mine took maybe just about 10 minutes let it cool for a moment and then it's just a matter of slicing it and combining it with the other ingredients since this is such a simple dish i made the extra effort to find a great can of tuna and her recipe calls for chili flakes but i had this jar of calabrian chilies so i sliced those added them to the salad all the same there are some capers a drizzle of olive oil lemon juice some salt and then you toss it all together and i gotta say i was blown away by the salad a common complaint of zucchini is that it's boring it's watery but here those attributes are actually used as virtues among all these other flavors capers very briny and salty tuna obviously big fish flavor these calabrian chilies which are kind of perfumey and fruity and also spicy and so the zucchini kind of plays this more muted tone and you just kind of get like more of a refreshing mouthful of water on paper it was very surprising to me but once i ate it it made total sense considering how simple it was this was kind of my new favorite thing the next dish i tried was zucchini alaska and i referenced a recipe from the youtube channel spizzyada so it starts by slicing it into sort of medium thick rounds and you sort of have to use your judgment of how much these slices will shrink in size and then salted it let them sit for a while and then once again i put them into a dish towel to wring out any excess moisture then it was a matter of frying in olive oil until they were getting golden on both sides then it was just a matter of seasoning with sliced garlic mint leaves olive oil and vinegar and this dish is meant to sit with those ingredients for at least a few hours or i think typically overnight to be served cold at a later point there's only a couple of flavoring elements here but the result is really big some of those sugars are awakened in the frying and then you have all these bright and delicious flavors that are put back into the zucchini i love any dish that falls into this category of something that you can make whenever you have a chance to make it and then eat it at any point in the future i even took some of that leftover focaccia it was magnificent so the next recipe was zucchini bread and i referenced the recipe from smitten kitchen i wanted to make zucchini bread because i never made it before and because the focaccio was a baked good zucchini on top and now i wanted to make a baked good with zucchini incorporated into it i began by weighing the exact required amount of zucchini and then it was grating it on a box grater and in this case you actually keep all of the moisture that is in those zucchinis it was actually very refreshing to do a zucchini dish where the moisture was not the enemy of the outcome so then it was just a matter of adding the other ingredients and you mix all of those ingredients thoroughly so that when you add the flour you can mix as little as possible then you pour that batter into a prepared loaf tin and then you put some very coarse sugar which will hopefully make a crust so then it goes in the oven until you can put a toothpick in and it comes out cleanly and the recipe also called out that you should wait until the next day to eat the zucchini bread because it'll be so much better so the next day was the moment of truth it's amazing and i wouldn't say that it tastes like zucchini i think your initial bite you get mostly the spices the cinnamon and the nutmeg but then you sort of have like this uh background flavor like after you've taken a bite and you exhale it tastes like you just ate some squash it's kind of incredible i mean when you're looking at this brown mixture of grated vegetable how is this going to turn into something that i want to eat for dessert it's pretty magical i thought this was so so good the last recipe i made was roasted zucchini and i followed these particular instructions from chef thomas keller and i think this is the dish that surprised me the most though it may not have been my favorite you begin by taking a couple of zucchini splitting them lengthwise and then scoring them in a cross cross-hatch manner so there's a diagonal grid across all halves then you salt it as evenly as possible and let it sit for about 20 minutes you can see immediately there's you know water pooling on the surface so you blot off as much moisture as you can then those halves are seared in a pan with a minimal amount of oil at just sort of a moderate high temperature you're just getting as even of an initial caramelization as possible and that just takes about five minutes maybe a little bit more and then the whole pan goes in the oven for 20 to 30 minutes or until they're at the tenderness that you desire earlier i made the sauce which is this sausage and i started by peeling tomatoes so i cored them made an x on the back end then i boiled them for less than a minute or until i could see the skin coming away then immediately shocked them in ice water and then completely peeled them and then i removed any tough center that the tomatoes had and then diced them and then the sauce was just combining this tomato some minced shallot minced parsley some oil salt and vinegar and i did this well in advance of starting the squash so that the flavor had a chance to develop the instructions were to cook this wash until completely soft i pulled mine out in about 20 minutes and this was the first surprising result which is that there's pretty big inconsistency between the different halves of squash some were very even one was way overdone compared to the rest even though the technique seemed dead simple there was a lot of potential for variation in outcome which had an effect on the final flavor then it was a matter of plating the squash halves and spooning over some of this sausage so the most surprising part of this dish was how good it really was and i know that this plate can appear sort of underwhelming it's just zucchini halves and some tomato on a plate right the most caramelized sections of that squash were almost candy sweet and they were extremely tasty and then you have this sausage which is all sort of acidic sharp flavor and so the pieces that were evenly caramelized and even when flipping and plating them where i could preserve those caramelized little side bits that made a big difference to the final flavor on this plate if i could stretch an analogy maybe i would say what a charcuterie board is to a pork chop this roasted zucchini plate is to a ratatouille it's just this singular taste of summer vegetable so that was my zucchini journey i had a lot of fun i hope you enjoyed watching there any zucchini recipes that you think i should know about i would love to hear about them but otherwise thank you for watching

Channel: About To Eat

Views: 609,136

Keywords: 10 pounds, About To Eat, Andrew Ilnyckyj, K_fe, Recipes, Zucchini, about to eat andrew, about to eat potatoes, boiled zucchini, boiled zucchini salad, focaccia, focaccia bread, focaccia recipe, kolokithokeftedes recipe, roasted zucchini, roasted zucchini recipes, zucchine alla scapece, zucchine alla scapece recipe, zucchini alla scapece, zucchini bread, zucchini bread recipe, zucchini focaccia, zucchini recipes, zucchini salad, zucchini salad recipes, κολοκυθοκεφτεδες

Id: j_aJvdxQAm8

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 14 2021