soup short cuts
October 20, 2018 11:04 AM

I'm making a lentil/veggie soup, right now as I type, kind of riffing off a recipe. I want to add sweet potatoes though it's not in the recipe. To save time I want to use the frozen sweet potatoes and/or butternut squash I have (Cascadian farms). I do not have a microwave.

Usually I just follow package directions for frozen veggies, ie, put them in boiling water, or sautee. However can you oven roast them the way you would with a real (ie fresh, uncooked, whole) sweet potato? Its not on the package cooking direction options. I also have a "real" sweet potato here, I just dont' feel like going to the trouble of cubing it.
Can I just put the packaged commercial frozen cubes on a cookie sheet and bake them before putting them in the soup or will they get gross, mushy or otherwise not optimally roasty, texture-wise?
I plan to leave some of the vegetables intact in the soup and puree some of the soup, so it's kind of chunky and the veggies have good mouth feel and flavor.
posted by nantucket to Food & Drink (5 answers total)
If you bake them, when they get into the soup they will for sure be mushy. If you want to keep them chunky, the best (only?) way to do this is to cube them, and then throw them into the soup and simmer for 10-15 minutes. They will cook fast.
posted by nanook at 11:08 AM on October 20, 2018


@nanook, thanks, do you mean put them into the soup frozen?
posted by nantucket at 11:11 AM on October 20, 2018


Yeah, frozen is just fine. When cubed, they will cook up fast, so keep an eye on them.
posted by nanook at 11:17 AM on October 20, 2018


I would just toss them into the soup frozen, and keep simmering the soup til the frozen veggies are the tenderness you desire. Roasting is too much extra work for the small boost in flavour it would give.
posted by pseudostrabismus at 7:13 PM on October 20, 2018


Follow up for future shortcutting soupmakers: I put frozen cubed sweet potatoes in for the last 20 minutes of simmering the lentil soup and it was great. Thanks Askme!
posted by nantucket at 8:39 PM on October 20, 2018


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