Becky B's Blog: Wolfgang Puck Butternut Squash Soup

14 years ago I had my first out of town consulting gig in Seattle, building the intranet for Washington Mutual Bank ("WaMu") which was later acquired by JPMorgan during the financial meltdown of 2008. At any rate, I lived and worked downtown for about 6 months and one of my favorite places to go for lunch was a "fast casual" Wolfgang Puck restaurant near the waterfront. My favorite dish there was the butternut squash soup. When I was older, I decided I wanted to try to make it, and figured I'd have to somehow reverse engineer it. However, I was happily surprised to find out that Wolfgang had published the very soup recipe online! My enthusiasm quickly disappeared, however, when I realized the reason he didn't mind publishing it was that no one in their right mind would try to make it, it would take so long. So, the idea of making squash soup was tabled for a decade. Instead, I tried to make due with any sort of approximation, such as Campbell's upscale squash soup. It just wasn't the same, though.

Then, this last week, in my community co-op food basket I received two butternut squash. I decided that now was the time to make magic happen! I decided that if making one batch was yummy, two batches would keep our family stocked with butternut squash soup for quite some time. 5.5 hours after beginning my squash soup adventure (with occasional breaks to keep the kids fed, dry, and not killing one another) I realized that I should really enjoy the soup because I will not likely try the recipe again for another decade. But for tonight, I'm looking forward to a little liquid gold in my bowl.

I started with four butternut squash and two acorn squash. I cut them in half and scooped the seeds out. I seasoned the open sides with salt, pepper, and nutmeg, then roasted them in the oven for an hour.

Next, I scooped out the meat of the squash (yes, this took forever. Maybe I'll use canned squash next time!) and added it to the blender to make it into a fairly chunky pureé.


Next, I sautéed a whole onion, chopped into little chunks, in butter in the bottom of my stock pot, over low heat, ensuring to cook it until it was soft but had not turned brown.

I added my pureed squash to the onions in the stock pot, and mixed in the spices such as ginger and cardamom as well as more salt and pepper.

Meanwhile, while I was stirring the squash to get it warm, I was heating some water on the stove to make chicken broth with some bullion cubes. I added the chicken stock to the mix and it began to appear very "soup-like" at this point. (As you can see, doubling my recipe, I had very little room left in the pot! I ended up using my bullion pot for the rest of the mixture after that.) Once it was thoroughly mixed and heated, I added a cup of heavy cream.


The last step was to put everything back into the blender. This is what pulverized the onions and gave the soup the texture that made me love it all those years ago. The cream in the soup gives it a silky smooth texture that just slips down the throat, and blending it adds that air to make it just that much more light and smooth.