Butternut squash soup, healthy, no cream

If you need a fast, simple, healthy butternut squash soup recipe without cream or coconut milk that is dairy-free, vegan and even paleo – this one is it! Since we seem to be allergic to all of the dairy-free milks out there and don’t use cream, we used cashews to make the soup creamier and it worked. Actually, it was SO good, a reliable butternut squash soup you can make with 10 simple ingredients in around 30 minutes.

The first time we heard about pumpkin or butternut squash soup was when we were doing our Master’s in biochemistry in Germany. Our friend kept telling us they were going to eat Kürbissuppe at home. Day after day after day. And after like 5 days, “we thought, when is that weird soup going to come to an end?”. We didn’t want to offend her, but to us, coming from the Balkans, the words pumpkin soup sounded horrendous.

See, we’re simple. It’s either bean, lentil, or chicken soup. Sometimes you could do meatballs or spinach and rice or things like that. Like, normal soup foods that don’t taste sweet. Sweet = dessert. Not sweet = soup or dinner. These are the rules of Balkan life.

The only two things we’d make with pumpkin or butternut squash (which we call violin pumpkin) were – 1/ bake it with some sugar and nuts, or 2/ make it into a dessert with phyllo pastry (usually as part of the pre-Christmas fast). And now that we're talking about it, we think we will make this, because we have phyllo dough and so many butternut squashes in our garden.

Anyway, our friend back then insisted that we should also try the pumpkin soup. She didn’t invite us for a bowl of their week-old gourmet dinner, so we had to buy a pumpkin and make it on our own. Well, Butternusskürbis was the cheapest and smallest one and therefore the winner that day. We still remember that soup 15 years later. We didn’t write down the recipe, but we remember we had put in some broccoli and dill in it and it was SO nice. We remember the dill made it even better.

Then we didn’t make any savory recipes with butternut squash for many, many years after. (Okay, we had forgotten about this soup)

Now, this is a different butternut squash soup as we didn’t have any dill and we made it without coconut milk or dairy. We used butternut squash, cashews (for the creamy part), onion, garlic, spices, lemon juice and some ginger. It was SO good. Like, we think even better than the one we originally made. Hope it doesn’t take us another 15 years to repeat. But if it does: here’s the recipe as a reminder for our future self and instructions for you! Below, we also share some step-by-step photos that we took in the dark when we made it.

How it comes together

Roughly chop the vegetables – butternut squash, onion and garlic.

Sauté the onion and garlic with olive oil, crushed red pepper, coriander and ginger.

Add in the pumpkin, salt and pepper as well as the water (or if using stock). Bring to a boil, then add in the cashews and reduce the heat to medium/low. Simmer covered for 20 minutes.

Add in some lemon juice, and adjust for salt and pepper. Then blend with an immersion blender thoroughly until smooth. Enjoy!