Spaghetti Squash is another one of those dishes I’ve never gotten consistent results with. Like Acorn (disclosure: I’ve never eaten Acorn Squash) or Butternut Squash, it’s got a hard outer shell and the soft meat inside. I’m too lazy to cut up a butternut squash and typically buy it already in soup form or already cut up and ready to cook. What sets Spaghetti Squash apart though is the fact that the inner meat is stringy when cooked and resembles cooked Spaghetti.
Many people, me included, tend to use it as a low carb substitute for pasta. You can put it under Marinara Sauce and add some meatballs and many people would never know that it was veggie and not pasta. As an added bonus it is high in Vitamin C and low on the glycemic scale. Enough science though since I’m not a nutritionist and this is more about pressure cooking and not science.
You can cook Spaghetti Squash in the oven or the microwave. I don’t like using the oven myself because you not only have to wait for the oven to pre-heat, but it takes an hour to do so. I’ve always cooked it in the microwave and come out with mixed results. Sometimes 10 minutes was perfect, other times it took 30-some minutes to get it to the perfect consistency. And by perfect I mean, easy to fork apart into pieces that resembled angel hair pasta. Anything less than perfect and it feels like you’re chipping away at an ice block. Obviously not the desired result.
This is one of the things I’ve been wanting to try since I first got my Instant Pot. I popped it in whole and set my pot to 10 minutes on manual and then it was supposed be 7 minutes “rest” but I didn’t take the lid off until 10 minutes. I can’t tell you how excited I was to open the lid and find that the skin peeled off like butter. The only thing I will need to remember for next time is to cut in half before peeling so the seeds are easier to remove. But even that was awesome – When cooking in the oven or microwave, cutting into a spaghetti squash took some strength AND you have to be careful not to hurt yourself. This wasn’t an issue in the instant pot and in fact, the skin cracked while cooking! While I found this ability awesome, it also made it harder to separate the seeds from the meat of the squash. Cutting it in half would probably make that easier, but either way it’s MUCH quicker than the oven option AND you get more meat off of the skin.
Another nice thing is that once your squash is ready, you can then keep the Instant Pot on and use the Meat Setting to brown your hamburger for meat sauce. Or be adventurous and try other things. 🙂 What type of things do you like Spaghetti Squash with?
Recipe: 1 squash, 1 cup water
Prep Time: Not applicable
Time to Pressure: I forgot to measure
Cook Time: 10 min
Release Pressure after: 7 minutes
Time from start to finish: Approximately 15-20 minutes
thisisliana.wordpress.com 