How to Make Butternut Squash Soup - Thanksgiving Dinner Ideas - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. Hi, I’m Chef Matt with Modern Art Catering, and we put together big special events in Los Angeles. When you buy your butternut squash and take it home, you just want to peel the outside. Cut it in half. The top half of it will be easy to cube up, and you’ll get nice, large chunks and cubes like this. The bottom half will have all the seeds inside of it. You want to cut that in half, scoop out the seeds, and then dice it up, just the same as the front half. And you’re ready to go with the soup. So, after we dice up our butternut squash, which I have here, we’re going to put it together in a nice roasting pan. I’m using a cast iron skillet. We’re going to get it inside of this, toss with some olive oil. Olive oil is great, it adds a nice flavor and helps the roasting process go quickly. A little bit of pepper and some salt. We’re going to get this in our oven at 400 degrees, which I pre-heated already. You want to make sure that your oven is at 400 degrees when you start. Oftentimes people will put the oven to 400, throw something in, but really what’s happening is the temperature’s rising and the food is slowly cooking, so it gets mushy. So, our oven’s at 400 degrees exactly. I’m going to toss this butternut squash in. There we go. That’s going to roast. I’m dice some onions, smash some garlic, and be ready for when it comes out of the oven so we can make our soup. Now we’re going to dice the onion. I have half an onion here. First, we make a few slices down the center of the onion, just like this. Then we take the onion and put it towards us, make a few chops right down it. Move the onion back to its original position, cramp our fingers back, and rock our knife. We get perfect dices every time. We don’t hurt our eyes because we do it so fast that it doesn’t have a chance to get into our eyes. There we go. We’ve got our onions, throw our scraps away. We want to make sure that this butter fully melts before we add our onions and garlic. Just toss in our onions and garlic. Hear that nice sizzle. Get that going. Want to put some salt in there. Salt really helps to sweat out the onions to release all their while they’re sauteeing in the butter, not to mention, adds a great flavor. Mmm. I wish you could smell this, the aroma is amazing. So now that our onions and garlic are sauteeing, we’re going to let that go for about a minute to really sweat out. We’re going to pull out butternut squash from the oven, which I believe is finished. Oh, yeah. Look at that, so beautiful. You see the nice roast? Take a knife, pierces easily right through. Perfect. We’re going to set this aside. Once this is ready to go, we’re going to add this to our pot, a little bit of chicken stock, and get going with our soup. So, now we’re going to add our butternut squash to the pan. Look at that color. It’s already so beautiful. Take a little bit of chicken stock, which I have here. You can just buy canned chicken stock, or you can make it yourself from leftover turkey bones. Add it to our pot just so it barely covers the butternut squash. We’re going to bring that to a boil and let it simmer for about 10 minutes to really get the flavors together, and then we’re going to blend it up. I have one remaining secret ingredient which I like to put in my soup: Wild Turkey. Wild Turkey goes great with all sorts of squashes: pumpkin, acorn, and especially butternut squash. I just add a very little bit to the top. It adds a great flavor. My family loves it. So, our soup is at the boil right now. We’re going to get it to a simmer, let all the flavors kind of marry together for about 10 minutes. I like to put my butternut squash in first, and not just add all the liquid, because then I can really control the consistency of the soup. Let’s get this all in here. Got that garlic and the onion. It’s absolutely beautiful. First, we’re going to blend this up, add a little bit of my liquid. When you put your cap on your blender with a really hot soup, you want to make sure there’s a towel on the top, otherwise the soup will blow up. Now the butternut squash soup is all blended up. Aw, it’s so delicious. Such a beautiful color. As a garnish, I’m going to add a little bit of olive oil to the top, some parmesan cheese, and some freshly cracked pepper.
