There is no shortage of recipes for pumpkin soup. Today we explain how we find it particularly tasty, describe an alternative preparation technique and give you some ideas for variations to suit your personal taste.
Pumpkin is a plant genus that has been cultivated by humans for thousands of years. Many of the fruits of these plants are edible and are known worldwide under various names. In our opinion, the Hokkaido pumpkin is best suited for soup. This variety is grown in very different parts of the world, including Japan, New Zealand, USA (California, Florida), Mexico, South Africa and France. The fruits are rather small, with an average weight of around 1.2 kg. They have a deep orange color and their skin is not only edible, but also contributes a lot of flavor. It should therefore always be included in the preparation.
The pumpkin is washed, halved and then cut into quarters. As these fruits are very hard, you need a large knife for this and can easily injure yourself if you are not careful. It is best to cut off the base first so that you can position the pumpkin stably on the cut surface before slicing it in half.
The seeds and the fibrous tissue surrounding them can then be easily scraped out with a spoon. The remaining flesh, including the skin, is cut into thick strips and then into cubes, although the exact size is not important.
According to most recipes, these pumpkin pieces are now sautéed in a little oil in a large pot before being cooked in liquid. You can definitely do this and achieve a great result. However, in our opinion, the flavor intensity increases enormously if you proceed differently at this point:
Preheat the oven to 160 degrees Celsius with fan (otherwise: 180 degrees top and bottom heat).
We season the pumpkin pieces with salt, pepper, curry powder and chili. This is one of the rare occasions when we use curry powder, but it harmonizes perfectly with the pumpkin in almost any composition. Then we add a little olive oil and mix everything thoroughly with our hands until the spices and oil are evenly distributed.
We bake the pumpkin on a tray for a maximum of 30 minutes. When a knife slides easily into the skin, it is cooked and we test this from minute 25.
You can’t achieve such intense roasting flavors if you sauté the pumpkin in the pot before cooking, which is exactly why we like to take the extra time for this step. The soup becomes all the more delicious.
We now use a large pot to bring a mixture of vegetable stock and orange juice to the boil.
The vegetable stock gives the soup more depth of flavor than water would. The orange juice perfectly supports the intense flavor of the pumpkin while adding the necessary sweetness and acidity. As a starting point, we suggest a ratio of 70:30 between stock and juice, but you can adjust this to suit your taste and give the soup a completely different character. As always, you will find the quantities at the end of this recipe.
We now season this stock with ginger and garlic, finely grated. We use a Japanese grater (Oroshiki) or one of the products from Microplane. If you can’t or don’t want to grate finely, you should first fry the chopped ginger and garlic briefly in a little oil before adding the liquid.
Then simply add the contents of the baking tray to the pan and simmer over a gentle heat for another 10 minutes until all the flavors have combined.
After that, the soup just needs to be pureed, which is best done with a hand blender. And even if we don’t advertise and don’t receive anything for it: This is undoubtedly the ESGE “ Zauberstab”. Since we’ve already mentioned Microplane, it also has to be referenced. Finally, season to taste with salt and possibly a little pepper.
Pumpkin seeds briefly roasted in a pan are a great addition to the soup, both in terms of taste and texture. As we are currently in Austria and live very close to Austria, the delicious pumpkin seed oil is always available to us. If you are not familiar with it but can get hold of it, you should definitely give it a try – in all kinds of dishes and combinations, including vanilla ice cream, for example.
Enjoy.
And may the taste be with you.
Ingredients (for 4 people):
Base:
1,000 g Hokkaido pumpkin
4 tbsp olive oil (alternatively: neutral vegetable oil)
1,000 ml vegetable stock
400 ml orange juice
This makes a ratio of 1 kg pumpkin : 1.4 l liquid
The ratio of vegetable stock and orange juice is around 70 : 30
For more fruitiness / sweetness, the ratio can be adjusted to taste in favor of orange juice
Spices:
10 g salt, 8 turns of ground black pepper
1 tbsp curry powder, 1 – 2 tsp chilli powder (to taste)
4 cm ginger, grated
4 cloves of garlic, grated
Possible additions (selection):
Sautéed onion
Carrot / potato / sweet potato
Paprika powder (also smoked)
Star anise
Nutmeg
Cream / crème fraîche / coconut milk
Possible toppings:
Roasted pumpkin seeds
Pumpkin seed oil
