Petite, sweet, and supercharged with nutrients, this baby butternut was bred with chefs in mind.
Meet The Chef
For Cheetie Kumar, one of Raleigh’s most revered chefs, seasonal ingredients have always been at the center of her diet. “The food traditions I draw from are rooted in seasonality. That’s how I remember eating when I was growing up in India.” In fact, she counts North Carolina’s agricultural community as one of the selling points that helped her decide to settle in Raleigh after college. “A big reason I live here is because I went to the farmer’s market on my first visit, and it was immediately familiar to me.”
Now, as the chef and co-owner of Ajja, she relies on seasonal produce to provide the canvas for creativity. “Cooking with the seasons gives me a boundary, a better box to work within. It’s nature’s way of telling us we’re on the right track, and I prefer to form a cohesive creative idea around that.”
Within that philosophy, vegetables take the center stage in much of the menu. “It’s important to me to make food that makes people feel good, that’s not an attack on their health,” she says. That focus is, in part, what drew her to the Honeypatch squash for our Chef’s Capsule Collection project.
These miniature cousins of butternut squash are perfectly sized for a single portion. Plus, they were bred in collaboration with chefs: when plant breeder Michael Mazourek was selecting traits from different trials, he leaned on the feedback of culinary professionals to determine which varieties had the most concentrated, sweet flavor.
When we delivered the first round of Honeypatch to Cheetie in September, she already had a plan to showcase the squash’s unique shape and size. “I want to hasselback them and roast them, then adorn them with fun flavors. Each plate will have a full squash,” she shared. The final version that hit the menu featured spiced butter, saffron yogurt, savory oat & pumpkin seed crunch, and urfa honey – the warm spices running parallel to some of the traditional southern flavors often paired with winter squash, but with a more global twist.
Film: Vittles Films
Music: Elmore Heights by Blue Dot Sessions
Cheetie Kumar, Ajja
ABOUT HONEYPATCH
Honeypatch squash (also known as ‘898’) is the second generation of a winter squash project first launched in 2009 from Michael Mazourek, a plant breeder and associate professor at Cornell University. He’d been working on breeding miniature butternut squash, but had trouble finding a market for them. A chance meeting and conversation with Dan Barber, chef and sustainable agriculture evangelist at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, led him to the right audience for his diminutive work in progress: chefs.
After a few rounds of beta testing with Barber, who gave feedback based on flavor and texture, the first round, called Honeynut, started spreading through farms in the Northeast. Just a few years later, it was everywhere, including major grocery chains, thanks in large part to early adoption by well-known chefs in New York.
But as the Honeynut continued to grow in popularity, Mazourek was already at work on the second version, which he called ‘898.’ “Honeynut was a breakthrough, but it was very much like an heirloom,” Mazourek told us. “There are lots of things we love about heirlooms, but there are also usually some drawbacks. With Honeynut, we learned that it didn’t have much of a shelf life; it didn’t store well. And once it started being produced in bigger quantities, that was leading to food waste issues. ‘898’ was bred to solve that and have a longer shelf life.”
It turns out that breeding for flavor as the priority has another added bonus: increased nutrient density. Honeypatch (the market name of ‘898’) has about twice the amount of beta-carotene as a traditional butternut, and one serving has more than double the recommended daily amount of vitamin A. Part of that is due to the size: The miniature squash has less water, which means more concentration of nutrients. But flavor has an even simpler correlation to good nutrition: the more concentrated a vegetable’s flavor, the more likely that people will eat it. “In general, we don’t really lack for nutrients in real whole foods and produce. But we do lack for those foods in our diet. So if we can make vegetables more attractive, trendy, tasty, kid-sized – anything we can do to get people to consume more vegetables – that’s going to be fantastic for our overall nutritional health,” notes Mazourek.
How many different varieties of squash has Mazourek sequenced and tasted in order to get to Honeypatch? He estimates that it’s well over 1,000. And as any seed breeder will tell you, the job is never done.
SEEDS
We got our seeds from Row 7, a seed and produce company that was founded as a result of the Honeynut project. Since that initial collaboration with Mazourek, Barber has worked with other seed breeders to bring the same approach to other varieties of produce. His model: Select for flavor as the number one priority, and use chefs as these vegetables’ publicists. The model worked, and yielded other Instagrammable veggies with sticky names like Teagan (a lettuce that is drought and bolt tolerant, and combines the crunch of iceberg with the flavor of red leaf), Badger Flame (a golden beet with more sweetness, and less of the polarizing earthy flavor), and Upstate Abundance (a tiny, but resilient and buttery potato). Row 7 was formed as a seed source for those who were looking to cultivate these unique new varieties.
The company has grown in the last few years from selling just the seeds to also selling the final product. The Row 7 team works with more than 20 farms across the country to cultivate its seed catalog for distribution to larger outlets like Whole Foods.
GROWING HABIT & HARVEST
We started seeds in our greenhouse in April, and transplanted to the field around Mother’s Day. We planted into landscape fabric to help with weed pressure, and spaced plants 12 inches apart. They grew vigorously, and formed fruit earlier than expected. We began to harvest in early August and continued through early September. In the final weeks before harvest, the plants began to defoliate, leading to sun scald on some of the fruit. We covered with shade cloth to counteract. In total, we harvested approximately 250 pounds of squash from 200 row feet.
We cured them for two weeks, and then stored them in a climate-conditioned space for another six weeks. Toward the end of the storage period, about 25% of the squash showed some dehydration around the neck and stem.
