Baked Squash and Parmesan Soup

November

I love the abundance of November, there’s still just about stuff tumbling from the poly tunnel including a few very late and not all that sweet tomatoes, we have had our annual batch of pigs taken care of so there’s bacon to make and a freezer full of wonder, squashes and herbs to use up and well – darkness, the smoke of bonfires and the cosy heat from the ESSE lending a new warmth to this old farmhouse kitchen, full of drafts, holes, dogs and the occasional intrepid slug.

So, with the possibility of the last fun before Christmas resonating in the background of life I’ve put together a couple of really simple warming and spicy crowd pleasers for this month’s kitchen diary, I hope you like them, I hope you find them super simple to make and I very much hope you will share them with friends.

Baked Squash and Parmesan Soup

Cooking squashes needn’t be the peeling and coring gruelling exercise it seems to mean to most people. I bake almost all squashes I use whole, after a brief scrub and a good drizzle with olive oil and a generous sprinkling with salt and pepper. You can then, once baked and cooled, core the squash out very easily, scrape the flesh from the skin should you decide not to use it and then you have lots of tasty baked squash flesh to use for whatever purpose you like; salads, sides, sauces or indeed, soup.

Often I will make a soup out of a baked squash, using the scooped out seeds and a little onion as the base for a stock, retain the flesh of the squash with the skin on as it adds extra healthy fibre and wont effect the delicious texture of the soup whilst the same time enhancing the depth you will get in flavour by including all the lovely browned and caramelised “roasty” bits – a “win win” effectively – it’s also an easy one to sling on whilst you are using the oven for another dish – thus saving you energy too.

Less of a recipe and more a guide to getting the consistency right, the following step by step will help you find the right spot. You don’t need to use parmesan, or finish the dish with crispy sage, but both work excellently to elevate this simple pottage to supper party status.

So, here we go then;

Ingredients

• 1 squash
• 1 onions
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 8 or 12 sage leaves
• 1 tablespoon of butter
• Some water
• A few black pepper corns
• 1 glass of dry white wine
• A little cinnamon powder
• Olive oil
• Salt

Method

1. Set the top oven of your ESSE to around 180 degrees Celsius and close the oven steam vent.
2. Wash and scrub your squash and select a suitable baking dish or oven proof pan, drizzle the whole top of the squash with olive oil season with salt and pepper, and fling it in the oven. More or less forget about it but perhaps set a timer for an hour and then have a look, you want the whole thing to be fully cooked so prod it with spoon back and see if it gives.
3. Different squashes will have different cooking times and the size will also come into it, I used a Japanese winter squash the specific name of which escapes me but it is a little like a Crown Prince, so fairly firm fleshed and quite robust – mine was about the size of a volley ball and needed almost two hours to be full baked. If you are using a spaghetti squash or similar it will take far less time, a butternut will probably be somewhere in the middle.
4. Once your squash is cooked, remove it from the oven and allow it to cool down – this can take rather a long time, and they can be handled whilst they are hot, but I prefer to let them come down to something approaching safe to handle before I get too involved with them, this I think improves the flavour of the end result but I maybe imagining it. Discard the stalk and the hard bit on the bottom.
5. Scoop out the seeds into a small saucepan and add any fluid that has gathered in the baking vessel. Add a halved onion with the skin on and a few cloves of bashed garlic, pinch of salt, dash of white wine, sprig of thyme, a few black peppercorns and a fresh bay leaf if you can manage it. Top this up with cold water and bring to a gentle simmer, before leaving to steep for about 20 minutes.
6. Meanwhile, break up your squash flesh and skin and add as much of it as you think you will need to the jug blender, set the rest aside for use in other things. Strain the stock into the blender over the baked squash within and blitz. As a rough guide I’d say you really want the fluid to come around 4 5^th’s of the way up the squash you have in the blender – but some squashes are more densely fleshed than others, remember the old chef maxim here, it is easier by far to add more fluid if required than to remove it.
7. Season, adjust consistency, add a dash of cinnamon powder, a pinch of chilli flakes and blend again, this time with a timer running for 1 minute – you will feel like it is a very long minute but trust me, let it have the time, the results will be silky smooth, tip and scrape out the soup in to a pan and allow it to just re heat nicely without boiling it, adjust the seasoning as required. Grate about a handful of parmesan cheese and fling half into the soup. Stir it in.
8. In a small frying pan melt a tablespoon or 2 of butter until it is almost but not quite turning brown then add a few sage leaves and spoon the butter and leaves about a bit, remove form the stove but leave the leaves in the butter to go crispy, serve the soup in bowls with a few sage leaves, a drizzle of the butter from the sage pan, a further sprinkling of grated parmesan and a few more chilli flakes.

Recipe created by Tim Maddams. Tim is a chef, food writer and cookery teacher who produces seasonal recipes for ESSE at his home in Inverness using ingredients grown in his kitchen garden. ESSE first met Tim over ten years ago when he regularly co-featured in the hit TV series River Cottage. During his time as head chef at River Cottage Tim pioneered ethical, local, seasonal produce and became a key spokesperson in the area of responsibly-sourced food.

Tim’s aim is to show off the “tremendous versatility” of the ESSE 600 X electric range cooker. The new 600 X has ESSE’s classic heat storage construction, patented ovens, beautiful colour finishes and the reassuring ‘solidity’ with modern, electric controllability and responsiveness.