“Hurray! More zucchini! Just what I wanted!,” said no one ever during the month of August.
I jest, sort of. It’s just that after making that umpteenth loaf of zucchini bread or mastering, for the eighth time, the technique for not-mushy summer squash sauté, the thought of more squash can sometimes be too much to bear.
Summer squash is the opposite of fleeting. You don’t need to search for it. When its time comes, it is there whether you want it or not, pounds and pounds in all shapes and sizes.
You really have no option but to get to know this most prolific of warm-weather crops better—you think a yellow squash and a yellow zucchini are one and the same, don’t you?—and then break out those loaf pans. Again.
Not too hot
Summer squash likes warm, but not extremely hot, weather. For many of us, August is its peak, though in moderate climates like California, it can grow nearly year-round.
And how. The squash plant grows rapidly, producing blossoms and then fruit at such a clip, “you pretty much have to pick it every day,” says Zack Snipes, an agricultural agent with the Clemson Cooperative Extension in Charleston, South Carolina.
Three types of squash
All zucchini are squash, and all squash are zucchini… right?
Not quite. Zucchini is one category of squash. There’s also yellow squash and pattypan or scallop squash. Within each category, there are many more varieties still.
Zucchini is most familiar, but it's not always long, cylindrical, and dark green. There are round zucchini, too, and the skin can range from pale green to striped green to yellow.
Yellow squash, not to be confused with yellow zucchini (though they don’t taste much different; yellow squash and be substituted easily into most any zucchini recipe), is more bottle-shaped and either straightneck or crookneck, meaning the neck tapers off straight or into a curve, respectively.
Pattypan or scallop squash are small, flattened orbs with distinctive scalloped edges. Like zucchini, they come in different shades—green, yellow, even white. Although pattypans are adorably petite, they’re not the same as baby squash, which are also adorably petite but are just regular squash picked really early.
Romulo Yanes
