The Handy Tool Alton Brown Uses To Remove Squash Seeds

While many vegetables tend to go in and out of season like a reliable old friend, you can find a variety of squash that's ripe and delicious for the eating year round (per The Washington Post).  If you want to put a batch of this veggie on the grill for the Fourth of July, fresh summer squash will do the trick. And if you hope to prepare Maple Roasted Squash in honor of Thanksgiving, winter squash will make your dish taste refreshing and light. However, while finding and preparing fresh squash for a nutritional side is generally a breeze, when you want to de-seed your vegetable for a special recipe, things can get a bit tricky.

If you're set on roasting some delicious squash rings for your next dinner party, you probably de-seed your vegetable by cutting it in half before struggling to scoop out all of its seeds with a spoon (per Simply Recipes). However, you'll be relieved to know that seeding squash doesn't have to be this way.

Renowned chef and "Good Eats" host Alton Brown revealed on his YouTube channel that it only takes a simple tool to make seeding squash a breeze — and it's a cooking utensil you probably already have in your kitchen.

In an episode of Alton Brown's YouTube series "Quarantine Quitchen," the chef and bestselling cookbook author (per Random House Books) took audiences along for the ride as he prepared a grilled dinner composed of corn, sausage, and, of course, grilled squash rings. After he set his squash rings on the grill, Brown noted that he had used a simple trick to seed his squash. He peeled the vegetable, cut off the top, and de-seeded it using a grapefruit spoon.

As The Garden of Eating explains, a grapefruit spoon is more efficient at seeding squash thanks to its sharp edges, which feature tiny teeth. So while you'd have to dig into the vegetable to properly remove its seeds with a regular spoon, using a serrated grapefruit spoon cuts your workload in half.

However, it is important to note that while a grapefruit spoon will make seeding any variety easier, the squash Brown used that he didn't have to cut in half to de-seed was a delicata. This type of squash tends to be thinner than others, which is more than likely the reason it didn't need to be halved to properly remove the seeds. 

So with that fact in mind and your grapefruit spoon in hand, you can prepare your next batch of roasted squash with ease.