Roast Squash and Sage Soup

Heat the oven to 200C/400F with a large roasting tin inside it.

Halve the squash lengthways and scrape the seeds and fibres out with a spoon.

Cut each half across into crescents about 3cm thick, leaving the skin on. Roasted squash skin peels away in a strip afterwards, where raw it fights the knife and takes half the flesh with it.

Toss the crescents and the onion wedges with the olive oil and the 5g of fine salt.

Take the hot tin out and lay the crescents in it on one cut face, with a couple of centimetres of bare metal between them.

Tuck the unpeeled garlic cloves in among them.

Give them that room. A crowded tin traps the steam coming off the squash and it poaches instead of browning, which the roasted cauliflower with tahini in this collection sets out at length.

Roast for 35-40 minutes, until the undersides are deep brown in patches and a knife slides into the flesh with no resistance.

Wait for that colour. Squash simmered raw in stock gives a soup that is sweet and nothing else, and those browned faces are the only savoury depth this recipe has.

Melt the butter in a small pan over medium heat while the tin cools a little.

Fry the sage leaves for 30-60 seconds, until they stop bubbling and go stiff and dark green.

Lift them onto kitchen paper the moment they stiffen. Sage goes from crisp to black in a few seconds and burnt sage is bitter.

Keep the butter left in the pan.

Peel the skin off the roasted crescents with your fingers or a small knife and drop the flesh into a blender.

Squeeze the garlic cloves out of their skins into the blender and discard the skins.

Add the roasted onion and half the hot stock.

Fill the jug no more than two-thirds full, working in two batches if you need to.

Hold the lid down under a folded tea towel and bring the speed up from the lowest setting. Vegetables straight from a hot oven go on steaming inside a sealed jug, and that pressure lifts the lid off and throws scalding puree across the kitchen.

Blend for 60-90 seconds, until completely smooth.

Pour the soup into a pan with the rest of the stock and the sage butter.

Warm it through over medium heat for 4-5 minutes, to just under a simmer.

Stir in the cider vinegar.

Taste it. Squash is sweet and low in acid, and a soup that tastes flat almost always wants the vinegar or the salt rather than more stock.

Season with fine salt and the ground peppercorns.

Ladle into warm bowls.

Swirl a spoonful of the cream across each one and leave it unstirred.

Scatter over the toasted pumpkin seeds and the crisp sage leaves.

Cool any left over in a shallow container, refrigerate within two hours and use it within three days.

Freeze it before the cream goes anywhere near it, for up to three months.