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Come summer, zucchini are plentiful. And that’s an understatement. Once I’vemarinated,grilled, evenCaesaredmy weekly farmers market haul, there are (somehow) still pounds of summer squash left to play with. So why not look away from savory treatments? Chef Steven Satterfield had the same thought. In his latest cookbook,Vegetable Revelations, Satterfield uses zucchini in place of apples or berries in agingery zucchini crisp.
Satterfield’s goal with this book was straightforward: Show off vegetables in their prime through creative, sometimes zany, recipes. As he cooked, he found a new freedom to experiment with produce, churning out the vegetable revelations that eventually made it onto the book’s pages.
Enter: threading okra pods through skewers and grilling them like a rack of ribs;creaming peppery watercress instead of spinachto serve as a side to crispy chicken schnitzel; reducing celery and sugar into a syrup spiked with lime (and vodka too, if you’d like) for a riff on Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray.
And, of course, there’s zucchini crisp. “I wanted to show how versatile zucchini is and that it can be coaxed in just about any direction, including a dessert,” Satterfield tells me. “We are all familiar withzucchini bread, so it comes as no surprise to work it into sweeter territory.” Still, where zucchini bread is often an exercise indisguisingthe squash’s texture by grating and squeezing the squash into oblivion, Satterfield notes that his zucchini crisp recipe highlights this very component—with a few specific techniques to make for the most pleasant baking and eating experience.
Before Satterfield’s book came out, zucchini crisp (sometimes called “zapple crisp,”) actually had a bit of a viral moment on TikTok. Like many internet trends, it’s nearly impossible to know who kicked off the excitement, but many users credited their inspiration to make the dessert from private chef Meredith Hayden, also known by the handle@wishbonekitchen. (Hayden was tipped off from a commenter who had a recipe for “zapple” pie, featuring an all-zucchini riff.)
In her video, Hayden simply swaps in zucchini for a standard apple crisp recipe. “It doesn’t taste like apples…mainly because it’s missing the tartness of an apple,” she observed in the video. Noting the dish likely needed additional lemon juice and that the squash baked up a bit mushy, Hayden ultimately gave it a thumbs-up. All the more reason to add Satterfield’s recipe—which specifically takes zucchini’s composition, which is not the same as apples’, into account—to this summer’s baking plans.
Botanically, zucchiniisin fact a fruit, but it’s not naturally sweet-tart like the apples, stone fruit, or berries you’d typically find in a crisp. (Does zucchini really even *have* flavor, or does it simply provide a texture to absorb the flavorful ingredients it’s dressed with? Jury’s still out.) To mitigate this, in his recipe, Satterfield macerates cubed zucchini in granulated sugar,apple cider vinegar, and lemon for half an hour. Not only does this process allow the zucchini to soak in that much-needed sweetness and acidity, as it sits the squash also releases water. Like, alotof water. Anyone who’s baked with especially watery produce knows that excess hydration can lead to soggy, stodgy bakes. Hovering at around95%water content, zucchini needs to let go of some of that liquid in order to bake up tender, but not mushy.
“But don't throw it out!” says Satterfield of the macerating liquid; instead, cook off most of the water by reducing the liquid into a thicker, sweet-vegetal syrup. You’ll toss the macerated zucchini with this syrup (and some freshly grated ginger) before covering it with an oat-pecan streusel topping and baking.
Spread out on a sheet pan and roasted with oil, zucchini can crisp and take on color at its exposed edges (or—horrors—when crowded or under-salted, disappointingly turn out pale and limp). It’s a different story when the zucchini is snuggled in a baking dish with sugar and covered in a blanket of buttery streusel. In Satterfield’s crisp, the zucchini bakes soft, but thanks to his maceration technique, still hangs onto some firmness to bite through. Let a scoop of vanilla ice cream melt into the crevices and anyone would assume summer squash was made for the crisp treatment.
By virtue of such a success story, the mind naturally wanders to other vegetables that could stand to be crisped. Satterfield shared triumphs of parsnip muffins (a lemon-glazed parsnip cake is also featured in the book), as well as a beet red velvet cake; and of course there’s the classiccarrot cake, so root vegetables seem natural contenders. Personally, I’m thinking about fudgy Japanese sweet potato and kabocha squash. Should we give it a go? Satterfield offers an answer of sorts in his book: “My mantra: Eat more vegetables, try new things, and never stop learning.”
