(Spoiler: Their recipe wins.)
According to Kottke, this sweet potato and butternut squash soup recipe was for a time the most emailed story at NYTimes.com.
Two or three weeks ago, I picked up ingredients for something alarmingly similar; I finally got around to cooking it last week. A few differences in our lists of ingredients:
- I used a large shallot in place of a small onion.
- I used perhaps double the ginger (in proportion to my recipe); then again, my ginger is frozen.
- I used butternut squash, acorn squash, and sweet potato, proportioned about 3:2:1 instead of their mixed of butternut squash, potato, and sweet potato.
- I used much black pepper.
- I dropped a cinnamon stick into the mixture briefly, and grated a touch of nutmeg into the pot. I didn’t want to go overboard with the seasonings, but I thought just a little savory complexity might keep it from tasting like baby food.
- I intended to top each serving with thinly sliced scallions, but they’d gone bad in the fridge before I got around to cooking.
The biggest difference in our recipes, though, concerns cooking process: I roasted the squash and sweet potatoes, rather than just boiling away. In hindsight, the resulting caramelization may have sweetened the dish too much.On first taste, the soup leaned heavily in the direction of candied yams marshmallowed to excess—which I have always hated.
The sweetness mellowed over the next day in the fridge, happily. Two additions also helped. First, a healthy drizzle of high-quality, extra virgin olive oil infused cold with a whiff of garlic turned the dial towards “savory” enough to make a difference.
Second, half-inch cubes of tofu added a nice texture and diluted the flavor enough to let the black pepper and ginger do their work. Silken tofu would’ve been much better than the firm stuff I had around.
On balance, the Times‘s recipe would probably come out better than mine, at least for my distaste for sweet autumn soups. I’d stick with some of my ingredient substitutions (black pepper, less sweet potato, more ginger), but definitely abandon the pre-boil roasting. Too sweet!
