Butter Blossom is a variety developed specifically for blossoms. It is a zucchini type and many of the zuchs would probably serve your purpose.

Zucchini indeed has the biggest, and vining zucchini has more than bush. Costata Romanesca for example, which also has the best zucchini. Make sure you take advantage of the two-weeks male-only production, that's how people discovered the great taste of the blossoms, they tried to put them to use. You can then keep on harvesting each and every male for the rest of the season, so long as you use a small paint brush to pass on the pollen to the females. It is called having your zucchin and eating it too. Of course, if you have SVB it is all moot.

I second glib on the Costata Romanesca - it's a fantastic zucchini for starters, and secondly it produces great large flowers :)

Is Costata Romanesca a vining or bush type?

Bush, and a very, very large bush at that.

This is a costata romanesca plant - early in the season (middle of June) - it is not full grown yet - just to give you an idea of how big they get :) In this picture it's about 3X3 in size, it got to about 4X4 or a little bigger by about July 1.

But - imho, it's well worth it to have 1 in your garden! If you like Zucchini and /or Zucchini flowers - this is the plant to have!

{{gwi:22499}}

My favorite way of preparing squash is to just slice and grill. Does costata romanesca taste good that way?

Yes, by far that's the most common way we cook it. (We also make breads with it).

We slice it, drizzle with a little olive oil and pepper / salt it, and on the grill it goes.

Great part about the Costata, is it tends to keep it's consistency on the Grill and not completely fall apart like some Zucchini's do.

Funny story, I sell at a farmers market an have brought blossoms a few times. They don't sell well and don't keep so I don't bring them often.

One time that I did, a nice couple stopped at my booth and he pointed to the blossoms, quite excited and wanting to buy them. They proceeded to have a 'discussion' where she kept repeating over and over again "I am not cooking those for you". As they walked away, he was begging and she was shaking her head 'no'.

Are they really that hard to cook? I have been curious but have never attempted anything.

spogarden, hah! Maybe the guy should have just learned to cook himself. I have never seen them at our farmers market, hence the question I posted. I wish people would sell them but I understand that they are hard to keep fresh outdoors when the temperature is high.

My default way of cooking blossom is to just batter and fry it. Sometimes I shred some parmigiana cheese over it when it comes out of the pan. I have also seen recipes that stuff it with cheese before battering and frying. Some people saute it and use it in pasta or use it as pizza topping.

I pick them to cook sometimes, and love them stuffed with cheese, especially mild cheese, like Jack. YUM.
I use either a tempura type batter, or chile relleno style fluffy batter.
Glad

Can anyone tell me the best point for the bloom to be at when it is picked? I saw a chef on tv cook some and it looked as if the blooms had opened, then closed again. That didn't look very appealing.

I am happy to see this discussion, last year I had a ton of blossoms and didn't know what to do with them so I let them rot. But not this year!!

That is my question too, at what point do you pick them?

they hold up best if you pick them just prior to opening... i sell produce both to restaurants and at farmers markets and i agree that they don't do well at the market. restaurants on the other hand can't get enough of them...

costata romanesco is an excellent variety for both blossoms and squash- the squash has a somewhat nutty flavor other varieties lack.

I too prefer the unopened blossoms, but even those a little over the hill are wonderful. For a way to cook them, google frittata recipes, and substitute squash blossoms to whatever they put in the eggs. Frittata is like an omelette, but browned a bit better. You can put a lot of blossoms in it, even more blossoms than eggs by mass. It seems that in my house we eat a lot of eggs, stating with garlic shoots in March, until the squash blossoms in June-July. then we stop for the rest of the year. Finally, it is true that most of the Costata plants are bush, but I have seen at least one that was vining.

I wonder why they don't sell? As a bit of a foodie those things are good! I cannot imagine why they would not sell. I don't find them in the farmer's markets here and I suppose that is why.

The wife & several of her friends have been cooking the male blossoms of my "Zucchetta Rampicante" summer squash. They are quite large, and borne in great profusion, especially as the vines get large. We harvest them at sunset, the day before they would open. If we wait until morning, when the blossoms begin to open, we'd have to pluck out all of the cucumber beetles that had crawled inside. :-(

Glib, that recipe sounds really interesting, I'll have to try that.

i can't begin to tell you how many cucumber beetles i have removed from squash blossoms over the years... :)

I am definitely interested in growing costata romanesca. But just in case I won't have enough space once I planned out my garden for the year, do you guys have squash with smaller footprint with good blossoms?

I never thought about picking the squash flower the night before it opens! I have to try that this year. I love this forum... all the cool information that I would never find anywhere else. :-)

Is Italian Marrow another name for costata romanesca?

I hope so, I have some seeds and am excited to try some blossoms this year!