The Courgette Glut Survival Guide: 12 Ways Through a Mountain of Courgettes

Every British summer follows the same script: by mid-June the courgettes arrive, by July they're one of the best-value vegetables in the shop, and by August anyone with an allotment or a grow-bag is leaving them on neighbours' doorsteps like a vegetable protection racket. Around 50p to 70p each at peak, endlessly versatile, and yet most of us cook them exactly one way — watery coins in a stir-fry — and wonder why we're bored.

This is the full survival guide: the one technique that fixes courgettes forever, twelve actual dinners, and how to freeze the surplus so August's glut feeds you in November.

The one rule: courgettes are mostly water

A courgette is roughly 95 per cent water, and every disappointing courgette dish is a failure to deal with that. You have two options. Cook it hard and fast — high heat, cut sides down, don't crowd the pan — so the water evaporates and the flesh browns instead of stewing. Or take the water out first: grate, salt lightly, wait ten minutes, then squeeze in a clean tea towel like you're wringing out a grudge. Browned or squeezed, a courgette tastes sweet and nutty. Steamed in its own juice, it tastes of regret. That's the whole secret; everything below builds on it.

Twelve ways through the mountain

1. Charred coins — thick slices in a screaming hot dry-ish pan until properly dark, then oil, garlic, lemon, salt off the heat. A side dish that converts sceptics.
2. Fritters — grated and squeezed courgette, an egg, a spoon of flour, crumbled feta or grated cheddar, fried in patties. The single best glut recipe in existence.
3. Courgette pasta — soft-fried with loads of garlic until collapsing and jammy (15 minutes, don't rush it), tossed with spaghetti, lemon and hard cheese.
4. In tomato-tin anything — diced into the base sauce, chilli, curry or stew, where it melts in and pads the pot for pennies.
5. Traybaked with sausages, red onion and peppers — the no-thought dinner.
6. Griddled ribbons — peeled into strips, griddled, dressed with vinegar and chilli flakes. Posh-looking, costs nothing.
7. Courgette soup — sweated with onion and garlic, stock, blitzed with a handful of cheese. Freezes perfectly.
8. Stuffed boats — halved, scooped, filled with the scooped flesh plus cooked rice or leftover chilli, cheese on top, baked.
9. Curry — chunks hold up well in a coconut-milk curry with chickpeas; add late so they keep some bite.
10. Pickled — quick-pickled coins with vinegar, sugar and salt; brilliant in sandwiches for weeks.
11. Courgette 'butter' — slow-cooked with olive oil and garlic for 40 minutes into a spreadable jam for toast, pasta or under a fried egg.
12. Chocolate courgette cake — grated courgette disappears into a chocolate loaf cake and keeps it moist for days. Tell people afterwards.

Freezing the surplus properly

Raw frozen courgette chunks thaw into disappointment — too much water, remember. Freeze it in the forms you'll actually use: grated and squeezed dry, pressed flat in bags (fritters and soups all winter); cooked down into that garlicky pasta jam or soup base; or diced and roasted first so the water's already gone. Flat bags, labelled, filed upright — the freezer organisation guide has the full system. A summer hour of this turns a 60p-a-kilo glut into a stack of winter dinners bought at summer prices.

Nobody has ever grown a sensible amount of courgettes. The skill isn't restraint — it's absorption.

Buying and storing them well

In the shop, pick courgettes that are firm, glossy and heavy for their size, with no soft spots at the ends — a bendy courgette has already started spending its water. Small to medium is the sweet spot for flavour and texture; the enormous ones are watery and seedy, best reserved for grating into fritters, soups and cake where that doesn't matter. Yellow courgettes and the round varieties cook identically to green, so buy on price, not colour.

At home they want the salad drawer of the fridge, unwashed and loose or in a paper bag rather than sweating inside sealed plastic, where they'll hold a week to ten days. Don't wash until you cook — dampness is what turns them slimy. If one goes soft before its turn, it isn't lost: soft courgettes are exactly what the soup, the pasta jam and the curry were invented for, since every one of those recipes cooks the texture away on purpose. The compost bin should be the destination of last resort, roughly never.

If you grow them: picking strategy

Pick small and pick often — a courgette at 15cm is dinner; the marrow it becomes a week later is a doorstop with seeds. Checking the plants every other day in peak season isn't optional, because one hidden fruit under a leaf will secretly become a caber while you're not looking. If you do end up with marrows, they're not lost: stuff them, curry them, or grate the lot into chutney and cake. And courgette flowers, if you're lucky enough to have them, are lovely torn into salads — the stuffed-and-battered restaurant version is optional showing off.

The budget takeaway

For shop-shoppers, the play is simple: from late June to early September, courgettes should be in the basket most weeks — they're at their annual best and their annual cheapest at the same time, which is the whole magic of eating seasonally. Cook them hot or squeeze them dry, lean on the fritters, and bank a few flat bags for winter. Come December, when the same courgette costs double and tastes of fridge, you'll be eating August's at half the price.

And if a neighbour with an allotment presses a carrier bag of them on you over the fence this summer, say yes with enthusiasm. You now have twelve answers, a freezer plan and a chocolate cake up your sleeve. That bag is dinner for a week — it just doesn't know it yet. Fritters on Monday, pasta on Wednesday, cake at the weekend, and the neighbour gets a slice back over the same fence. Everybody wins, especially the courgettes.