Australian · Salad
Roast Kent Pumpkin, Warrigal Greens and Macadamia
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with a warm current of chile, acid holding everything up to the light, ending saline and clean.
Ingredients
- 1 kg Kent pumpkin, unpeeled, in 3 cm wedges
- 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
- 1 tsp sea salt flakes
- 200 g warrigal greens, thick stems pulled off
- 80 g macadamias, toasted and roughly chopped
- 100 g fresh ricotta
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- 2 tsp honey
- 1 small red chilli, thinly sliced
- cracked black pepper
Equipment
Sheet pan
The skills inside
Roasting in a hot ovenSteaming: basket, leaf and lidBlanching & shocking
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: dairy · nuts
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Toss the pumpkin with 2 tbsp of the oil and the salt and spread it in one layer with space around every wedge; a crowded tray traps steam and nothing will colour.
- Roast at 220C (430F) for 30 to 35 minutes, turning once, until the cut faces are burnished and a knife tip meets no resistance at the thickest point. 35 min
- Meanwhile drop the warrigal greens into a large pot of boiling unsalted water for 45 seconds, lift them into iced water, squeeze dry, and tip the blanching water down the sink.
- Whisk the lemon juice, honey and remaining oil with a pinch of salt and dress the squeezed greens in it.
- Pile the warm pumpkin and the greens together, dot with ricotta, scatter the macadamias and chilli and crack pepper over.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Roasting in a hot oven 56 recipes
- The oven was fully up to heat before anything went in, given time beyond the indicator light rather than judged by it.
- Every piece has air around it. Nothing touches its neighbour and nothing is packed to the edge of the tray, because crowded food steams itself in its own moisture and never browns.
- Colour is even across the whole tray, the tray having been turned at least once: no pale row at the back and no dark row at the front.
- It came out BEFORE the target temperature, not at it. Carryover keeps driving the inside up by several degrees after it leaves the oven, and that rise is part of the cooking rather than an error in it.
- The temperature was read at the coldest part rather than the easiest one to reach, and read again after the rest.
Where it goes wrong The tray was crowded, or the oven was not truly up to heat. The food releases steam faster than a cool box can carry it away, so it sits pale and slack, and the extra minutes spent chasing colour take the inside well past where it should have stopped.
Blanching & shocking 76 recipes
- A large volume at a hard rolling boil, and enough of it that adding the food barely interrupts it; a pot that goes quiet has started stewing rather than blanching.
- Timed rather than watched, and short. This is an interruption in the cooking of something, not the cooking of it.
- The ice bath was made and standing beside the pot BEFORE anything went into the water, not started once the timer went off.
- It went straight into the ice water, fully submerged, and stayed until cold at the centre: a piece still warm inside is still cooking, and the arrest has not happened yet.
- Drained and dried afterwards rather than left sitting in water, so it does not carry that water into whatever it meets next.
Where it goes wrong The ice bath was not ready, so the food sat draining in a colander while its own residual heat carried on cooking it. By the time it cooled it was a stage past where it was pulled, and exact arrest is the entire reason for blanching rather than simply boiling.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Sauvignon Blanc (Sancerre)
- Also Right
- Grüner Veltliner
- From the Taps
- Berliner weisse
- Zero-Proof
- Cucumber-lime water
Green plates want green wines: vinaigrette’s acid meets its match, and the difficult vegetables surrender to Grüner.
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