Mark Bittman's Creamy Pumpkin Soup from How to Cook Everything; with annotations by Manni
Recommended Tools, In Addition to What You Probably Already Have Kicking Around Your Kitchen
- a kitchen scale, something like this
- a large pot (8 quarts or more) with a lid
- a way of blending/pureeing the soup; I highly recommend this; it truly kicks ass and is a favourite at America's Test Kitchen
- ice cream scoop (for seeding the pumpkin)
- a rubber mallet from a hardware store
- a cleaver (The rubber mallet and cleaver are the safest way to cut open a pumpkin. Rip the stem off the pumpkin. Place the pumpkin on a cutting board, and make sure it doesn't seem like it will roll away. If it seems too round on the bottom, shave off pieces with a sharp knife until it seems really stable. Now, cut a groove in the top of your pumpkin where you can seat the sharp edge of your cleaver. Rest the cleaver's blade in the groove you just cut, and start tapping on the top of the cleaver with the rubber mallet, while holding the cleaver handle with your other hand. This is where you'll know if you did a good job ensuring your pumpkin doesn't roll around! If the pumpkin feels secure, use a little force! Once the pumpkin is split in half, it should be easy to core with, let's say, an ice cream scoop. Once seeded, use a decent chef's knife and cut each pumpkin half into crescents. At this stage, you can further cut the crescents into cubes, as per the regular recipe, and peel the skin off the cubes, or, you can keep them as crescents for my alternate preparation below.)
Ingredients
- 3 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 1 pound pumpkin, after being peeled, seeded, and cut into 1 to 2 inch cubes (hint: this pumpkin ended up yeilding a bit more than I needed)
- 1 pound crisp tart apples, such as McIntosh or Granny Smith, or Braeburn (about 4 or 5), cored, and roughly chopped
- 1 large onion, roughly chopped (what's a large onion? I assumed the size of an apple)
- Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
- 4 cups chicken, beef, or veggie stock, preferably warmed (you probably won't need it all) (Formaggio's carries frozen stock by the cup or by the quart; I used half veal stock and half veggie broth when I made this for my brother's family, and the dark veal stock lent a hearty back-note that complimented the fruitiness of the apples and wine)
- 1/2 cup dry white wine (This wine was cheap and great! The guy in the wine store said it's "unoaked", which I think just means not aged in oak barrels, which means it's more fruity, and that worked great in the soup. It also drank well while cooking)
- 1 teaspoon fresh tarragon leaves, or 1/4 teaspoon dried tarragon (get fresh if you can) (Be sure to mince the fresh tarragon leaves, because they take up less room that way, and you'll get more flavour out of the 1/4 teaspoon. This is where the nice aromatics come from in the soup, so err on the side of using too much.)
- 1 cup heavy or light cream (go heavy or go home!)
- minced fresh parsley leaves or snipped chives for garnish
Preparation
Place the butter in a large, deep saucepan [like the 8 quart pot I recommended above]; turn the heat to medium. When the butter melts, add the pumpkin, apples, and onion. Cook, stirring, until the onion softens, 5 to 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. [When I did this step, I cooked everything until the onions were translucent, because that's when the onions get sweet, and I like my onions sweet, not sour.)
Add the stock [not all of it! just enough to cover most of the solids. If there are some peaks of solids still sticking out of the liquid, that's actually good. This is the optimum liquid-to-solid ratio for a creamy consistency when you puree everything later. Using too much broth will produce too thin a soup, and this recipe calls for more than you need], wine, and tarragon; turn the heat to medium-high and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down to low, partially cover, and cook for about 30 minutes, until the pumpkin is very soft. Cool slightly, then puree the soup in a food mill or blender. (This is where an immersion blender comes in really handy; wear long sleeves, and blend everything right in the pot!)
(You may prepare the soup in advance up to this point. Cover, refridgerate for up to 2 days, and reheat before proceeding.)
Return it to the pan and cook gently over medium-low heat until heated through; do no boil. Stir in the cream and cook, stirring, until hot, about 1 minute (do not boil). Garnish and serve.
Alternate Preparation
Instead of peeling and seeding the pumpkin into cubes, seed the pumpkin and cut into crescents. Pre-heat an oven at 425F. On a cookie sheet or in a roasting pan, place the pumpkin crescents skin-side down, and drizzle the upward-facing flesh of the crescents with olive oil, or, better, melted butter (butter browns better than olive oil). Salt and pepper the crescents, and put them in the oven. Roast them until you get some caramelisation/browning on the flesh of the crescents. This will probably take about 45 minutes or so, but don't do this based on time. Look in your oven from time to time (preferably through the window if your oven has a light, so that you won't let precious hot air out of your oven) and look for browning, and even the teensiest bit of char on any of the stringy bits of flesh left over from the seeding process.
Once the crescents have caramelised/browned a bit, and are nice and soft (poke with a toothpick; if they are the conistency of the inside of a french fry, or perhaps a tad firmer than that, they're soft enough), remove from the oven, and allow to cool, or at least get warm. Do the recipe as above, except do not cook the pumpkin with the apples and onions. Instead, once the onions are translucent, add the pumpkin, and then the liquid (the pumpkin has to go in before the liquid just so you know how much liquid to pour). Oh: and the best way to get the pumpkin flesh out of the skins, after cooling, is with an ice cream scoop.