Wednesday Test Kitchen – Fall Squash & Pumpkin

This is the fall version of the Test Kitchen I would guess.  Last week, I had a ginormous hubbard squash and a bunch of pretty little sugar pumpkins from Iacopi.  I roasted both of these – making a soup with the squash and pumpkin biscuits.

Onto the menu:

Pumpkin Buttermilk Biscuits w/ home churned butter

Hubbard Squash & Dogfish Punkin Ale Stew served w/ sous vide beef shank

Onto the pics:

The Stew:

   

Stew was fragrant and amazingly tasty with the sweeter spice notes from the beer spelled out nicely.  The shank was actually still very pink in the inside because I essentially just brought it back to temp when it cooked in the stew.  You could easily braise all the meat in the beer over 3-4 hours and then add the roasted squash to finish for 1-2 hours.  That would also be a kickass stew. 

 

Biscuits:

   

Biscuits were nice and fluffy, but just a smidge too dense.  I’m sure the butter temp was very cold, so maybe the dough was a little too wet/dense because of the pumking buttermilk mixture.  I might have to account for that or find a way to get a little more rise out of the baking soda/powder combo.  Definitely still tasty as hell.  I did also go with shortening this time since I had it, but next time I may go back to my all butter recipe.  Just needed a itty bitty tweek and I’m there.