Just Bento

Hello!

Achocha fruits are best harvested young, before the hard black seeds start to mature - after that you have to cut them open and remove the seeds, or risk breaking your teeth :)

Some people eat the young ones raw, a bit like green pepper. I find them a bit too green, but they're nice cooked in anything you'd put a green pepper in. Real Seeds recommend slicing them onto a pizza; I've also heard of people making them into chutney. Once they start fruiting you should have plenty to experiment with!

Just tried this vegetable/fruit for the first time stuffed like a pepper ( like in Mexico) or like a squash flower dipped in flour & water and fried. It was stuffed with ground beef, but I think a rice & cheese stuffing would be great. It's also used very much in soups, but not to overpower.

I went for a stay in Spain with the family and, a week after returning, I'm still trying to catch up again with life in London. I finally managed to get down to our miniscule 'allotment and harvest the mature achocha (weather got a lot colder very recently, so the vines are looking rather brown, I doubt there'll be many more achocha to come). I have a good few but I'm still not too sure what to do with them.
Just like Emma, I didn't much like them raw and immature (indeed, too green, like a tastleless cucumber infused with grass essence).

Mature, they're much better, not a great taste by itself (these are not a substitute for pimientos de Padrón!), but fried with plenty of garlic they're quite pleasant, particularly whilst still hot.

I'd love some guidance on stuffing them though, particularly without meat. I did a lot of rooting around Spanish language recipes but pretty much all the recipes involved stuffing caigues with meat and immersing the stuffed fruit in meat stock and simmering over a long period.
I guess I could try adapting a Greek dolmade recipe, but I suspect that if I stuffed the achocha with rice I'd just regret not having made vine leaf dolmades instead (it's a lot of effort). I will definitely try putting cheese inside them.

Very easy to grow, though. This year I planted one, next year I might plant two I have a lot of bare fence behind my little 'parcela' so the achocha doesn't take up hardly any of the actual earth I have to plant in.