Happy Friday! To those of you in the U.S., I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! I am here in Seattle visiting family and we had a delicious feast yesterday.
We’re rounding out this month’s French Fridays with Dorie selections with another soup. This one is squash soup, specifically Beatrix’s Red Kuri Soup. According to Dorie, her Parisian friends look forward to this soup all year long! They love the sweet, chestnut flavor of the squash.
I’m not convinced I really had a red kuri squash, at least not the same kind Dorie uses for her soup. It was labelled “Red Kuri”, as evidenced by the picture below:
It certainly has the right color, and the skin became soft during cooking, a hallmark of the red kuri squash. But I didn’t detect any chestnut flavor, and it wasn’t a sweet squash. Also, it doesn’t have the right shape. Here is an image I found elsewhere online:
Photo Credit: http://www.rareseeds.com/red-kuri-squa-hokkaido-/
See that pointy top? Mine didn’t have that at all. If I ever find (or grow!) a red kuri squash that looks like the image above I will try this soup again to see if it tastes different.
Anyway, did we like the soup? Not really. It didn’t have much flavor, and I was expecting this soup to have a special flavor after the build-up Dorie wrote about in the lead-up to the recipe. My husband said we might as well have been eating boxed soup. Ouch!
I can’t help but think it was the squash that wasn’t right. I had part of the squash left over, and I roasted it as a side for dinner another night. The roasted squash also did not have much flavor.
If you are certain you have a real red kuri squash and want to try this soup, you can find the recipe on Dorie’s site: Red Kuri Soup.
From Scratch 
Not specifically for red kuri squash (which I seldom see in the store), but I have noticed that the flavor of so many kinds of squash is inconsistent. This happens to me with butternut, hubbard, buttercup, acorn, etc. It is so frustrating. I can’t figure out the trick to know it will be tasty. I hope you had a great holiday with your family in Seattle.
Ouch indeed! I think I can trust most of the stickers on produce these days. I’ve seen more ‘non pointy’ squash varieties than pointed ones around here, so you might have gotten the right one. I wasn’t a fan of the butternut squash + chestnuts combo, but hey, at least I tried it.
Squash flavour can be a bit of a roll of the dice. The ones I bought were really great, thank goodness. So glad you had a great holiday!
Interesting, your squash looks almost right, I wonder if it is a red kuri squash which was left on the vine too long and therefore just got to big. I find that with other squashes too, that they taste better when they are picked young. Might explain the loss of flavor. That’s too bad really.
It is so disappointing after all the work to find you don’t care for the results.
I did not find a red kuri squash anywhere so I used butternut. It was good
and we enjoyed it. Have a wonderful weekend.
Sigh. Our soup was tasty enough, and I’m the one who bought the same squash from the same farm. I also was wondering, though, if it really was a kuri squash even after all of that. What a bummer that it was not a recipe that worked out!
That definitely looks like red kuri I’ve bought it several times and I’ve never detected an chestnut flavor either. I didn’t like the original recipe but with vegetable broth instead of water and roasting the squash.. you might like it.
Glad you had a nice holiday.
I think where vegetables are grown makes a huge difference – the squash that I would get from my CSA always seemed more flavorful than the ones from the store.
Except for not having the “pointy” top, your vegetable looks like a Red Kuri. And, since the skin did soften and was able to be pureed, I think you had the correct squash. My Red Kuri was grown in Longmont, Colorado and I bought it at Whole Foods. We could distinctly taste the nutty flavor and found the soup delicious. Your soup looks beautiful. I am so sorry it was tasty.