Last week I made the Stir-Fried Kabocha Squash with Sake and Miso from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook.

On the surface, this recipe looks a lot like the Stir-Fried Eggplant with Sake and Miso only with kabocha squash instead of the eggplant. I have never cooked kabocha squash before and, to my knowledge, have never eaten it either. It was readily available at the Your DeKalb Farmer’s Market, though.

The recipe calls for stir-frying the squash in oil first, then with some sake, then with the sake, miso, shoyu, and sugar ingredients for the sauce. All of that was fine, except the squash never really softened.

No one liked the end result. I thought maybe I could at least get through the leftovers, but we tossed what was left after I had one leftover serving. I just couldn’t eat anymore of it. We didn’t like the flavor of the squash nor the sauce.

Having not worked with kabocha before, I wonder if my particular squash was the problem. The flavor was chalky and the texture still tough. Was it too mature? Too large? Just a bad one? I don’t know.

But then why did we also dislike the sauce, given we enjoyed the Eggplant with Sake and Miso dish? On closer look, not only does the kabocha recipe have almost twice the volume of sauce ingredients (the bulk of the being the sake that the squash cooks in alone before the rest of the sauce ingredients), but their relative proportions differ: the kabocha recipe uses more miso and sake and less shoyu and sugar than the eggplant dish. If I remove the sake volume used for cooking the squash, it skews the miso to over double the portion of the sauce than in the eggplant dish, with the sugar and shoyu both being less than half of the portion. Was the squash supposed to add some sweetness that we missed out on? Again, I don’t know, but it was definitely seemed to need more saltiness and, perhaps, more sweetness.

I think this is the second recipe we just didn’t think was good. Kenji is still hitting on a high percentage of good-to-great recipes, so having a couple misses feels fine, but also kind of weird given the quality of everything else.

I am cooking my way through J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. Read more about it.