Butternut Squash Chowder

So I realize that my picture is bread (more on that in a bit) and not Butternut Chowder... but I failed to take a picture of the soup and I want to remember that I made it and really liked it!!

The Butternut Squash Chowder recipe comes from the book "Soup of the Day" book  that I have mentioned repeatedly in this blog.  If you are looking for a great collection of soup recipes, I highly recommend this book.

The soup is simple (and, as is my "rule", I will not include a recipe when it comes from a book) -- the basics are a roasted butternut squash (which is later blended),  onion, celery, and potatoes. The main seasoning is sage (though I used thyme) and the stock is chicken.  The recipe calls for first frying bacon until crispy and using that fat to cook the onions, potatoes and seasonings are added. Some white wine is added to deglaze and stock is added. Everything is cooked until tender. The blended butternut squash is added along with some heavy cream (a small amount).

It is absolutely delicious.  And I am fairly certain that this will still be delicious if it were made vegan (skip the bacon and heavy cream though, let's be honest, bacon makes everything better).  The main flavors are from the roasting of the squash and the sage/thyme. The texture is provided by the potatoes and celery.

The next day, I had some leftovers of this soup and some leftovers of a vegetable barley soup (something I usually whip together quickly with whatever veggies I have on hand and always includes barley, veggie stock and diced tomatoes).  My daughter was visiting and suggested putting the two together -- it was a great suggestion and I think I'll need to come up with a real recipe for that.

Now, as for the bread -- I need to provide some timeline context (well, I don't need to but I want to).  We are in the midst of the Corvid-19 outbreak and it seems to have choked my flour supplies. Additionally, I have been expanding my use of different flours and, more specifically, milling my own flour thanks to a really cool Christmas gift, a Komo grain mill purchased from Pleasant Hill Grain.  While I have purchased a variety of different types of flours, I thought I would start off with simple hard wheat berries for my first real test. I purchased hard white wheat and hard red wheat berries from Pleasant Hill Grain.

I decided to 50% whole wheat bread from biga from Ken Forkish's "Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast".  I made the biga (500g of KA AP flour, 340g water, .4g of yeast) the night before baking. First thing in the morning, I fresh milled 250g each of the white and red berries, keeping them separated. I ran those flours through a #20 sieve to remove any larger pieces of grain that might have gotten through (in 260g of berries, I netted about about 255g of flour post-sieve).

I then proceeded with the FWSY recipe, adding 1/2 the biga to each of the different freshly milled flours. You see the results in the pictures above (and if you look closely, you can tell that I'm still not the best at blending a white biga with whole wheat flour to stop from seeing the swirls of the different flours).

The red berry loaf is visibly darker throughout the process and, without a doubt, it has a more "earthy" flavor to it.  The lift and textures were nearly identical -- the white berry loaf  was just a tad flatter and wider but I do not know if this was due to (in order of probability):  the baking vessels were different;  something in my folding process; or some slightly different profile for each berry. Our panel of 3 judges voted for favorite with two saying "white berry" and one (me) saying "depends on what I am eating" ... bottom line, they were both delicious -- with good crumb and crust.

I want to experiment a lot more with different berries and different sieves.