On today’s menu is winter squash soup, made with rich chicken broth.
Crude recipe is given below, for putting this together in well under an hour, using a pressure cooker.
More importantly, this is a taste-test of traditional butternut squash versus newcomer Georgia Candy Roaster squash. Both of which I grew in my back yard garden this year.
My conclusion is that Georgia Candy Roaster (GCR) is not so much boastful advertising as a statement of limitations. Boiled — as here, in this soup — it’s pale and flavorless compared to butternut squash. I’m guessing GCR actually needs to be roasted to bring out any latent sweetness and flavor.
Alternatively, maybe I just got a bad GCR. If the rest of them look or taste any better, I’ll come back and edit this.
In any case, the picture tells the whole story. The butternut (left) and GCR (right) have a depth-of-flavor that matches the depth-of-color.
The Waltham butternut is a thin-skinned, thick-necked, sweet-fleshed winter squash, with deep orange flesh. In this taste test, the boiled butternut tasted much like sweet potato, but perhaps dryer or starchier or more potato-like in texture.
The Georgia Candy Roaster is a thicker skinned, no-solid-neck, starchy-fleshed winter squash, with much lighter-colored flesh. In this taste test, the boiled Georgia Candy Roaster tasted like potato, that is, starchy, but with no distinct flavor and no detectable sweetness.
Boiled, together, in squash soup, the mix of the two works fine. But the GCR is little more than a bland vegetable filler in this context. It’s definitely food, but not much more than that.
Plausibly, GCR squash is a lot better roasted. Just plausibly, this small-and-tubby GCR was some kind of sport. The coloring definitely matched the other GCRs.
My other observation is that the GCR has a much thicker skin than the butternut. I certainly wasted more of it, in the peeling process, trying to pare away any green material.
Neither here nor there. It’s food. This year, it out-produced butternut by a fair margin, owing mostly to the large average size of the fruit.
Schmaltzitarian squash soup.
This dish is winter squash cooked in full-fat, un-skimmed chicken broth.
The only seasoning is salt. The flavor comes from the squash and the chicken. If that’s not good enough for you, perhaps consider cooking something else, before you add flavorings to this recipe.
It’s meatless in the sense that the chicken meat. used to make the broth, is reserved for a separate meal.
Elapsed time is under one hour.
You need
- a pressure cooker
- a few (4 to 10, say) bone-in skin-on chicken thighs
- chopped vegetables enough to fill the pressure cooker 2/3rds full.
- Winter squash, primarily.
- With optional soup vegetables such as carrots or celery
- a teaspoon of salt
Step 1A: Pressure-cook the chicken thighs: Elapsed time 30 minutes.
Put a modest number of chicken thighs (4 to 10, say) into a pressure cooker. Cover (barely) with water. Heat. Figure on ten minutes to bring the pot up to pressure. Cook at high pressure for 20 minutes.
Step 1B: Cut up the vegetables.
As that’s going on, peel and cut up whatever is going into the pot. The backbone of the soup is squash, but I added carrots and celery that needed cooking.
You want enough to fill the pressure cooker about two-thirds full.
Step 2: Remove the chicken and excess chicken stock, if any.
Release the pressure by running the pressure cooker under a faucet.
Use a slotted spoon or similar to remove the chicken from the pot. Put the chicken aside for a separate meal.
Remove and save any excess stock.
In this soup, you want about one unit of stock for every two units of vegetables. So you want the pressure cooker to be about one-quarter full of chicken stock, to which you add chopped vegetables up to the two-thirds line on the pot. Or so.
Salt to taste. I use a teaspoon of salt for the pot of soup.
This doesn’t need any spices. With any luck, the chicken fat and salt add just enough savoriness to make a fully-satisfying bowl of soup as-is.
Step 3: Pressure cook vegetables for five-ish minutes. Elapsed time around 12 minutes.
Bring the pressure-cooker back up to pressure, and cook for five or so minutes.
Depending on how hungry your are, either release the pressure immediately, or let the pressure cooker cool off for a “natural” release. The longer it sits under pressure, the softer the vegetables get.
Step 4: Open and eat.
If the squash is soft but not fully disintegrated, you have chosen wisely. It is ready to eat.
If the squash has turned too soft, use a stick blender, then pretend that that’s the kind of squash soup you were after in the first place.
