Roasted Acorn Squash Soup with a Crème Fraîche Swirl
Acorn squash
Butter
Honey
Brown Sugar
Onions
Nutmeg
Pumpkin spice (optional)
Cinnamon (optional)
Salt and pepper
Crème fraîche
At Venice’s award-winning Blu Island Bistro, renowned chef-owner Alan Laskowski offers a hearty fall soup featuring one of his favorite autumn vegetables, the acorn squash.
“This soup is delicious,” he says and grins. “I have been making it since I was a restaurant owner up in Philly, maybe 30 years now. We sell the heck out of it. People love it.”
Chef Alan halves the acorn squash, scrapes out the seeds, rubs the squash with butter, honey and brown sugar, then roasts the halves face up in foil at 375 degrees for 45 minutes to an hour, until the flesh is soft to the touch. He scrapes out the meat from the blackened squash skin with a large spoon.
“You have to be careful not to get any black specks from the skin in the squash,” Chef Alan says. “It doesn’t look nice if you have any charred skin in it.”
He then puts the squash in a bowl, sautés butter and onions in a soup pot, adds the roasted squash, chicken stock, heavy cream, salt, pepper, nutmeg and pumpkin spice and blends it all smooth.
“I like to start it out thick, and if it is too thick, I add a little more chicken stock, cream or milk,” Chef Alan says. “If it gets too thin, it’s hard to get it thick again.”
Chef Alan always plays around with his recipe, sometimes adding cinnamon.
“It’s a fall, warming, Thanksgiving-style soup,” Chef Alan says.
“Part of our allure here at Blu Island Bistro is that people feel like they are home,” says Chef Alan’s partner and the restaurant’s manager, Kim Lemonde. “That’s the experience we provide.”
625 S. Tamiami Trail
941.485.8200
BluIslandBistro.com