SQUASH SZN IS HERE
and this is the soup you need to make
Oh hey there, Autumn, is that you ?! It sure is. Here in London we are in full Autumn swing, there are golden leaves gently falling to the ground, the parks are littered with conkers, the girlies have their big scarves out and most importantly of all, squash is back on the shelves. I’ve moved house (more on that next week) and I am feeling BIG back to school / new leaf energy.
I have always loved squash, which is surprising for me, being a salty savoury girl at heart. I actually love a squash for the way it’s sweetness pairs beautifully with acid, spice and salt, it’s the perfect vegetable to really hold many other disparate flavours. It’s the rug that really ties the room together - yes that’s a Big Lebowksi reference.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever been personally victimised by a squash - yes thats a Mean Girls reference. Sue me.
I have had my fair share of agro with the gourd. I distinctly remember on my first day working a busy service shift in a professional kitchen, I was tasked with making enough squash soup to feed 70 people (!) in just under three hours. In front of me was a sack of onions and a few crates of squash. Having never cooked at this scale before, I didn’t know the shortcuts to getting a vat of soup on the table, and so I diligently started to peel and chop around 30 onions and the same again of squash. Time was running out, the team were watching me make a fatal mistake, maybe because it was fun for them to see me fail on my first day, or because they wanted me to learn the lesson myself - we’ll never know. My plan was to make the soup the same way I would for a regular batch: sweat off the onion and garlic, add the diced squash, stock, aromatics, let it simmer away until cooked and then blitz until smooth.
To cut a very long and embarrassing story short, the soup was not made on time, the team stepped in at the last minute, knowing I was never going to make it in time for service, and took over with the help of a very hot and vast bread oven. I later watched someone else prepping squash and was fascinated and shocked to see them simply cutting in half, deseeding and roasting like that, or even sometimes whole if time was really tight! There was no peeling, no hands died orange, no heaving your entire body weight over the knife to get through to the other side. It was simple, quick, efficient, they were getting on with other tasks while it baked in the oven at an eye watering temperature. Since learning this technique, I’ve never cooked a squash any other way since - for a soup at least.
Here’s why it works, you half the squash and remove the seeds, creating a little well where you can stuff aromatic things like garlic, ginger, chilli and shallots. You then roast the squash cut side down, hiding these delicate aromatics and protecting the sweet inside of the veg. Because the skin is still intact, it protects everything underneath from the heat and instead they steam themselves to perfection, so after an hour the cloves of an entire head of garlic will be the texture of jam, and simply slip out when squeezed. The flesh of the squash will be silky soft, spoonable and ready to add to the soup or sauce you are making. I also use this technique with onions, again, sliced in half with skins still intact and roasted cut side down so the insides can steam. When you prepare squash like this, you cut out half the work and time and then you simply let the oven do all the work.
The recipe below is for my current soup obsession, it’s gently spiced with cumin, coriander and fresh chilli, has a deliciously creamy base note from the coconut milk and a brightness from the lime juice. The real magic is in the secret ingredient, that makes it more filling, and the topper, which helps use up odds and ends of ingredients from your fridge, reducing food waste as we go.
I hope you all enjoy this soup as much as me and my boyfriend did! He ate it straight after coming home from a swim and it was a huuuuge hit. See you next week for an update on my living arrangements…
Sending love, Rosie x
