Use any combination of butternut, honeynut, delicata, acorn, kuri, even kabocha squash to make this sweet roasted winter squash soup recipe, sweetened with apple cider and spritzed with fresh lime.
Author:Amanda MacArthur
Prep Time:20 minutes
Cook Time:1 hour
Total Time:1 hour 20 minutes
Yield:12 cups+ 1x
Category:Soups
Ingredients
Scale
6 lbs squash, peeled and chopped into 1″ pieces (5lbs after)
Add your cubed squash to a large baking sheet. Drizzle with walnut oil, salt, and pepper. Bake for 45-60 minutes or until soft, shuffling halfway through.
In the meantime, add chopped bacon in the bottom of medium sauce pan over medium heat and cook. Once crispy, remove bacon and set aside for garnish, leave fat.
Finely chop onions and sage, and add to sauce pan with red pepper flakes, reduce heat to low, and cook for about ten minutes. If you notice the onions are beginning to burn, which can happen on hotter stoves, then simply add a couple teaspoons of water here and there to keep the onions softening.
Once the onions are translucent, add apple cider to the sauce pan and use a spatula to mix around and scrape all the sticky oniony goodness off the bottom of the pan. This is a culinary trick that adds a lot of flavor to the soup! If you have a non-stick pan, you might miss out on this part, but add the apple cider nonetheless.
Let the apple cider reduce entirely by letting it simmer for a few minutes, then add the chicken broth and bring to a boil over medium-high heat.
At this point, the squash should be about ready. If you have an immersion blender, you can simply add the squash to the saucepan, and use an immersion blender to blend it into soup right in the pot. If not, use a blender and add the squash to the blender with the broth mixture. Cover the blender with a dish towel and hold the top while it blends (hot things in blenders can tend to erupt when the food is hot and the blender is too full, so be mindful.) For that reason, if you have a small blender, don’t fill it, blend in two batches.
Slice your ciabatta bread into 1/4-1/2″ slices and toast or broil. Drizzle slices with honey.
To the soup, add heavy cream, and mix. Add salt and pepper to your liking. Pour into bowls, top with crumbled bacon and microgreens if you have them, and gently squeeze a lime wedge over each bowl, placing on the edge so everybody can add it to their liking. Serve with sliced ciabatta drizzled with honey for dipping!
