It’s split pea or ham and potato for me.
In my mind, soup is just a technique that’s really about the stock. This is just me suggesting that you all should adopt traditional French cooking technique.
For me, it’s saving old chicken scraps and certain veggies and then cooking them until they are mush in water. Grocery store rotisserie chicken skin, bones, and juice; carrots, onions, celery, garlic. Anything getting past it’s prime. No brassicas though. I’ll throw a t bone in there, but while really good beef broth is amazing, good beef bones cost as much as real beef.
Clam juice or shrimp/crab/lobster shells sauteed in butter with water (or the aforementioned stock…) Is also awesome.
Once you’ve got that, just put anything in it. That’s good soup.
Make sure that you put the correct amount of salt in it. If there’s no salt, stock tastes terrible.
I love butternut squash soup. Its really simple to make if you have stock prepared.
All you have to do is heat up a duch oven with olive oil, throw diced celery, onion and carrot along with the cubed butternut squash and whatever herbs and spices you like. I also add a few tbsp of brown sugar.
Then after frying for 5 mins, cover it with stock and let it simmer for 40mins. At the end, blend it in a blender or with a hand-blender.
Its like 10mins of active work and you get 2-3 quarts of really healthy soup.
I’m doing nearly the same exept without celery. I’ll try to add it next time ! The 2 other changes that I’m doing are to replace the sugar with sliced apple for the sweetness (1/8 of apple per portion).
Also, adding blended cashew nuts (approx 30g per portion) improve a lot the texture and taste imho.
I made this last year and it came out with a texture my wife described as baby food. It was awful. Not sure what I did wrong.
That sounds like an underpowered blender. Squash takes a really high blade speed to properly cream. Cooking it a lot longer before blending could help.
Sounds like it was just too thick? More stock would be the solution then.
I love winter squash (roasted and al dente), but I’ve never really liked pureed soups. I can’t complain, but they are too bougie for me. Meanwhile, I’m also wanting lobster/crab/shrimp bisque that need to be that except for the expensive stuff.
I just need some solid chunks in my soup.
You could add some piece of ham/lard in the puree soup, and eat with bread or “crouton”
If you’re set against it I won’t try to convince you, but you can always reserve as many pieces of simmered butternut squash as you like and put them back in after blending. You can do the same with potato chunks, and also add other things in after pureeing like herbs or leafy greens.
There’s a lot you can do to add to the texture of a pureed soup.