Martha Stewart’s Trick for Better Butternut Squash Soup Is Genius

I’ve had Martha’s blue cookbook (officially The Martha Stewart Cookbook, published in 1995) for almost a decade. It holds every conceivable recipe across its 600-plus pages. Whether I’m hosting Friendsgiving or looking for a fail-proof recipe for crepes, she’s got me covered. I can tell everything has been meticulously tested because I’ve never tossed out dinner. In fact, everything I’ve made from the cookbook has been delicious.

One of my tried-and-true fall favorites from this book is her Apple-Butternut Squash Soup. It’s cozy and comforting, the kind of dish that feels as at home on a weekday lunch table as it does kicking off a holiday feast.

Made with roasted butternut squash, apples, and leeks; spiced with cinnamon and orange zest; and thinned out with vegetable stock, it’s a true celebration of autumn’s best. Enjoy it with a hunk of crusty sourdough or serve in dainty bone china teacups as a first course… it just works.

Martha’s Take on Butternut Squash Soup

This soup begins the way you’d expect, by roasting the squash until tender. Here’s the twist: Before the butternut squash goes in the oven, Martha fills the hollowed-out cavity with quartered apples. As they soften and collapse into the squash, the apples infuse the flesh with a natural sweetness and complexity you’d never get from just sugar or stock. The result is subtly fruity and almost caramelized, with layers of flavor.

Martha’s recipe calls for Macintosh apples, but any soft, baking apple will do. Cortland, Jonagold, or Golden Delicious all play nicely here. Since the soup eventually gets puréed and then passed through a food mill (a finicky step I never have the patience for), the apples are roasted skin-on. If you’re like me and forgo the food mill, you may want to peel the apples first. Either way, the skins add both color and flavor.

The technique is truly simple: halve the butternut squash, scoop out the seeds, brush generously with butter (four tablespoons to be exact), tuck in the apple quarters, wrap the whole thing in aluminum foil, and roast until everything is tender and golden. From there, it’s just a matter of sautéing leeks, adding stock, blending, and seasoning.

Martha’s Apple-Butternut Squash Soup is a recipe that proves sometimes the tiniest tweaks—a few apples in a squash—are what take a dish from good to glorious.