Sweet potato soup with honey butter
for grown-up babies
“You can make a cardboard box taste like a fresh salmon and sautéed spinach on a summer evening.” — Suzanne, paid subscriber
We don’t have to read into the psychology of it, but folks seem to really like pureed soups that are essentially baby food. The ones you can slurp even if you don’t have teeth yet, or anymore.
This broccoli soup is very popular. This roasted cauliflower and garlic soup was one of the New York Times’s most popular recipes of 2024. This mushroom soup: not a looker, but has a five-star rating and comments that include “this is simply the bomb.”
Orange baby soup was my next challenge, specifically one made of sweet potatoes because they’re one of my 40 ingredients and my preferred orange vegetable. You see a lot more pureed soups made of butternut squash and carrots than of sweet potatoes because all the starch in sweet potatoes keeps them from blending up silky, smooth, shiny, and sweet.
Some recipes roast the sweet potatoes to convert some of those starches to sugars, but then you need a ton of water or broth to make soup — so much that it might not taste like much. Then in goes a ton of aromatics, cream, and butter; it tastes like something but that something isn’t sweet potato.
The geniuses at Cook’s Illustrated found a better way (honestly thank goodness for these people and their brains). Letting sliced sweet potatoes sit in hot water does science stuff that converts big starch molecules into smaller sugar molecules, which absorb water in such a way that the soup blends up so beautifully. The method doesn’t require all that much water so the flavor of the sweet potato flavor is really present — and sweeter without all the starch mucking things up.
I was happy eating the blend of just sweet potato, water, and salt, but we’re not babies anymore. A swirl of nutty browned butter brightened with vinegar, spicy from crushed red pepper, and sweetened a little more with honey makes it richer, more nuanced — more grown up.
