My wife will attest that while my mechnical apltitude is relatively limited, like most red-blooded American men, I love a task that involves using different tools & thinking outside of the box; admittingly, this typically ends in a good final product, but a larger clean-up!
When we were home in Illinois a couple of weeks ago, I was thumbing through a Bon Appetit magazine and came across a recipe for pumpkin soup created by roasting a whole pumpkin in the oven. Now, I like pumpkin/squash soups, but the idea of putting a pumpkin in the oven put me over the edge! And, as luck should have it, Central Market, our favorite Houston grocery store, happened to have Cinderella pumpkins (the type of cooking pumpkin the recipe called for) available.
All pumpkins are not created equally; some pumpkins, especially field pumpkins, aka jack-o-laterns, are best for carving & roasting their seeds. Other pumpkins, such as sugar or pie pumpkins, are great for cooking. Cinderella pumpkins are listed in the Bon Appetit recipe and noted as a suitable cooking pumpkin; however, we found out at the conclusion of our cooking process, the Cinderella pumpkin is not all that tasty of a cooking pumpkin. Low and behold, the Chicago Tribune published an article 24 hours after we finished cooking noting how Cinderella pumpkins were rather bland & watery.
Watery & bland pumpkin aside, we did pick out a nice pumpkin to work with....
The first step of the pumpkin soup process is just like carving a pumpkin-cut a lid into the pumpkin and remove the seeds and membrane.
With the seeds and goop out of the pumpkin, I put on my Paula Deen mask & armed myself with half a stick of unsalted "butta" and rubbed the inner the flesh with the stick of butter until the stick was no more.
The next steps in the pumpkin prep process include seasoning the inside of the pumpkin with salt, pepper, and sweet Hungarian paprika. The recipe calls for a spice by the name of piment d'Espelette, a French chili powder, but we keep it simple and practical in our kitchen!
After the spices, 1 cup of bread crumbs and 1 cup of grated Gruyère cheese (1 cup less than called for) went into the pumpkin. When it comes to bread crumbs, I think the store bought kind is garbage, and it's so easy to make your own, so we did just that! We toasted 2 slices of good sourdough bread in the oven at 350 degrees until it was crispy & dried out and then pureed it in our food processor. Admittingly, I think I should have made the bread crumbs finer, but they tasted and worked well!
Before the pumpkin went into a 300 degree oven, we filled it with 7 cups of chicken broth, leaving 3 inches between the top and the "water line" and capped the pumpkin with its top. The pumpkin baked with its lid on for 1 hour before baking for another hour with the lid off.
After the pumpkin was done roasting, our process took an Ad Hoc spin from the recipe. The recipe calls for the broth to be laddled into a serving bowl and served with a dollop of pumpkin flesh in the middle. While it may look posh in a magazine, it didn't seem practical nor appetizing to us, so we drained the broth from the pumpkin, and cut the pumpkin into sections and scrapped the flesh from the walls before we combined the two in a sauce pan.
I began this post talking about my tool box being pretty empty, but one tool in my kitchen tool box that I greatly value is our immersion (or stick) blender. We combined the scraped pumpkin &maybe a 1/2 cup of pumpkin broth at most and over low heat, hit it with the immersion blender until we achieved a smooth consistency, about 40 seconds.
Now that we had the consistency down, addressing the taste was the next step! Wanting to add depth to the soup, we added 1/2 teaspoon of cayene pepper and an 1/8 cup of brown sugar for a sweet start and a spicy finish.
Served with a piece of good sourdough bread, the soup proved to be a quality Fall meal, despite the outside temperature hovering at 85 degrees.
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