Fried Squash

Squash

1/2 c. milk or buttermilk

1 egg

1/2 c. all-purpose flour

1/2 c. cornmeal

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp pepper

1/8 tsp garlic powder

1/8 tsp onion powder

1/8 tsp paprika

Oil for skillet

In a small bowl, combine the milk and egg with a whisk or fork. Scrub the vegetables clean and cut off the stems and bottoms. Slice very thin and put slices in the milk and egg mixture to soak. In another bowl, combine the other ingredients. Put enough oil in the bottom of a skillet to cover it well and heat to medium high.

Retrieve the squash pieces from the milk mixture, then dredge in the flour mixture to coat. Shake off excess flour mixture. Fry the slices, flipping once, until they are golden brown on both sides. You may need to add more oil to the skillet depending on how many you have to fry. As you remove pieces to drain on a paper towel, sprinkle with salt. Serve hot.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re finally going to learn how to make fried squash.

It’s made by slicing the squash thin, battering the pieces, and frying them until they’re slightly crispy on the outside and tender inside. They make a great side dish or main course. It’s the same batter and method you use to fry green tomatoes and okra, but we’ll just focus on the squash.

You can use any squash for this recipe, including zucchini, but I like yellow squash because it’s so easy to grow that people give it away in piles as summer progresses and the squash plants get bigger and more aggressive. A few small squashes will make a lot of fried squash, too.

Once you have your vegetables, you’ll need two small bowls, a skillet, and a plate lined with paper towels.

In the first bowl, mix the egg and milk well, until the yolk is incorporated into the milk and the mixture is pale yellow and a little foamy. It’s easiest to use a whisk to do this, but I usually just use a fork. You can use buttermilk for this recipe if you have it, but you can also use regular milk.

Then give your vegetables a scrub if they’re dirty, or at least rinse them off. Then slice off and discard the stems and the bottom stub where the flower was. Then slice the rest of the vegetable up very thin. You don’t need to be able to read a newspaper through them or anything, but they should be thin. If they’re too thick they won’t cook all the way through.

After you slice the pieces, dump them in the bowl with the milk mixture. They probably won’t all fit, depending on how much you’re making, but this is a good way to keep them out of the way without them drying out.

In the second bowl, mix the flour, cornmeal, and spices. The amounts I listed in the recipe are just suggestions—I never measure the salt, pepper, and so forth, and just make sure I use the same amount of flour as I do cornmeal. You want generous amounts of the spices, though. If you’re only frying up one or two small squash, you can halve the dry ingredients because you’ll have plenty even so.

Next, pour a generous amount of oil into the skillet and turn the heat to about medium. You want more oil than you would use if you were frying meat or sauteeing onions. Cover the bottom with oil to about the depth of one of the vegetable slices you just cut, or a little less. I use olive oil but it doesn’t matter what kind you use. If you want to deep-fry your vegetables, you can add more, but oil is so expensive that I hate to waste it when shallow frying is just as good.

While the skillet is heating, set a plate next to the stove and line it with a few thicknesses of paper towel. You might also want to set out the serving dish you intend to use so you can move the cooked and drained pieces to it as you work. You’ll be frying these in batches.

Before you do anything