Butternut Squash Soup with Fresh Sage

I had purchased the butternut to go with the roasted chicken as an appetizer but I didn't get around to making the soup so that's what I did tonight. I had cooked a few butternut squashes recently since they are in season but I hadn't cooked them with sage yet. Sage is a pretty common herb for the fall and goes great with turkey and all things Thanksgiving.

To begin, I split the butternut squash which was bout 3-lbs in weight.


Once I split it, I prepped it for roasting which included lathering the flesh with unsalted butter and a few sage sprigs in the cavity.




After roasting for about an hour this was the end result (At left).

The sage had filled the kitchen with a nice fragrance. While the butternut was roasting, I prepped the remianing ingredients which consisted of an onion, some garlic, one white potato, leafs of about 10 sage sprigs, some ground nutmeg and 6 cups homemade chicken stock. The previous soups I've made called for butter and cream the smooth the final soup, however, PlumpJack's wanted you to retain the texture of the butternut and potato so there were no "smoothing" ingredients.

Once these were ready, I melted some butter in a soup pot then cook the onion and garlic, and sage. I say this again, the sage smelled amazing! Here's the pot before I added the butternut and chicken stock. Once the stock goes in, everything is brought to a boil then simmers until the squash was ready.



Time for the butternut! Once it was cool to handle, I scooped out the flesh and cut up the squash into managable chunks and tossed these into the pot and let this simmer for 15-20 minutes to soften them up a bit more.

This was then pulsed in a food processor in batches to make the soup. Again, it wasn't pulsed too much to retain a sort of meaty texture versus a creamy soup.

Here's the final product - ready to serve.


Rating: 80
Difficulty: Easy
Date Cooked: November 3, 2009

The reason for the rating is because I prefer a creamier soup. The saving grace was the sage which brought an awesome flavor to the dish. If I were to make this again, I'd modify it a bit to include some cream to soften it a bit.