Squash Kutsinta

From squash kutsinta

Last week I tried making kutsinta using the recipe posted by JMom. However, I used the regular white flour (not sticky sweet) that I got from Spice of Life, a health food store. As what she implied as she referred to her basis for the recipe, there really is no standard rice flour, that's why results can be expected to vary. She used mochi. Mine was not branded. Probably that was the reason why I ended up with rock hard solid bottomed-liquidy top kutsinta, which I first mistook as undercooked after 20 minutes of steaming, so I extended the time to reach 1 hour, and I gave up at the end of that. I tried one and threw them all away, not because of the taste but because of the consistency as I described above.

So I looked around again for another recipe I could try so I could bring kutsinta to our Filipina get-together (yesterday, actually). I would have tried to make the same recipe using the sticky sweet (glutinous) rice flour, but thought better of it..."What if it does not turn out the way I wanted it to be" So I looked again for another recipe not out of a homemaker's experimentations, but from a nationwide publication, the DOST's Tekno-Tulong website, using all purpose flour (can't go wrong with that!) and guess what? SQUASH! "This sounds insteresting!," I thought. Not only do I make use of my extra squash sitting in the freezer for more than a year now, but I also make my kutsinta more power-packed. Well, we know how nutritious squash and other yellowish-orange-ish veggies are.

The final verdict was made, of course, by my Filipina friends.

From lye solution

Although the recipe only gave me several kutsinta, we all decided it was good!

The only issue I encountered was that some of them was too liquidy at the top, that I resorted to microwave them one by one to further cook, but still ended up with soft solid bottom and a liquidy top. I guess that is because of sedimentation problems, with flour going more to the bottom and making that part more solid when cooked. But this won't stop me from making this again in the future. I might end up cooking it the same way I microwave-cooked pichi-pichi, but I will double or even triple the recipe. Or I might try using the double-boiler method, where I will boil water in a deep 10-in saucepan, place the cups there and pour the mixture; that way, the mixture will start cooking right away and not have time for sedimentation. Then as soon as I have poured into all the cups I will just cover then cook 20 minutes (I remember my ex-MIL using this technique for her lech flan and it worked good!)

Materials:
1 cup mashed boiled squash
3/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup all purpose flour, sifted
1 cup water
1 teaspoon lye solution (potassium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate solution)

Procedure:

1.Dissolve the sugar in water and boil, allow to cool.
2.Add the flour little by little.
3.Add the squash, keep on stirring until it becomes fine in texture.
4.Strain using two layers of cheesecloth (wring to extract the most out of the mixture).
5.Add the lye, stir.
6.Put the mixture in muffin cups, with allowance of a little space from the rim. (Photo in slides shows the second layer, I ended up probably with 12 cups, 3 of which had super liquid-y tops.)
7.Steam for 20 minutes.