Simple Squash Soup

Simple Squash Soup

I’ll start by agreeing that everyone and their mother, or at least foodie relative, has been doing squash soup for the past year and that it is so blasé. The only problem is that it also tastes really good and is fantastically easy to make, at least if you have an afternoon with nothing to do but watch TV, read and browse facebook.

As always read all the instructions before you start cooking.

Mats:

10 lbs of squash, 2/3’s butternut 1/3 acorn is my preference but other non-spaghetti squashes would probably work.
2/3’s of a gallon of stock (11 cups), I use turkey stock because it’s made of win and I always seem to have some this time of year but chicken or veggie stock would work just as well. If you’re buying your stock at the store (for shame!) try and buy the unsalted kinds.
3 medium bulbs of Garlic
Salt
Pepper
Chili Powder
Cumin
1 Beer, dark.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

Go grab your squash, if you’re lucky its fairly regularly shaped and can be easily cut. If you’re not lucky it resembles something out of a Tim Burton movie, in this case slap yourself, gently, once across the face. Next time buy regularly shaped squash. Cut the ends off then lop it in half, if you’ve got a bunch of different squashes try and make them all about the same size. So if you’ve got 2 butternut and 1 acorn after you’ve got the butternut in half longways give it another chop sideways so its close to the acorn squash in size. Clean out the seeds and dangly bits with a spoon and plop the squash skin up on a baking sheet. Squash goes in oven for at least one hour, probably closer to two. When do you know its done? When its done of course! Or you could poke it with a chef’s knife, when it meets little resistance (as if you had some squash in a bowl ready to eat and stuck your knife into it) its done.

While waiting for the squash to cook open and drink the beer. Also, stop looking in the fucking oven to see if it’s done; wait at least an hour.

Once its done take it out of the oven and let it cool. Go find your garlic and tinfoil. Make a tinfoil hat and wear it, not that there’s anything going on up there. Cut the point end of the garlic off so that all the cloves are sliced through at one end. Wrap ‘em in tinfoil and toss cut side up in the oven at 350 for 1 hour. They’re done when the garlic smell permeates the kitchen and the bulb is squishy, if you open the tinfoil up the garlic tops will appear an apple cider brown.

The garlic comes out of the oven, the oven goes off and you go back to looking at the now cooled squash. Grab a spoon, metal, and start gouging out the insides of the squash. We let it cool so that our free hand could hold the squash down. Be careful not to put the skin of the squash into the bowl. Take the squash flesh, skin freshly flayed from it, and put it in a large pot, at least 1 gallon in volume. Pour half your stock
and start blending. Blend and add stock until its’ got a nice velvety texture, smooth and thick .

If we stop right here we have an excellent blind squash soup, it can be flavored a ton of ways but I do it this way.

Salt to taste although why I expect you to know what that means I’m not sure. ½ tablespoon chili powder, cumin and black pepper (finely ground). Mix in and serve piping hot with more dark beer.

SuperBrie Pricing

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