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Why roast first
Most pumpkin soup recipes have you simmer raw cubes in stock. It works, but the result is watery and a little flat. Roasting drives off moisture and browns the sugars at the edges, so the soup tastes deeper without any extra ingredient. It also means you don’t peel anything: the skin comes off a roasted wedge with a spoon.
Use a sugar pumpkin or a kabocha. The big carving pumpkins are grown for size, not flavor, and will make a thin soup no matter what you do to them. If the store only has those, swap in butternut squash; nobody will know.
Roasted pumpkin soup
Ingredients
Steps
Step 1: Heat the oven to 425°F. Halve the pumpkin, scoop out the seeds, and cut each half into 4 wedges.
Step 2: Toss the pumpkin, onion and garlic with the oil and salt on a sheet pan. Roast 30–35 minutes, until the pumpkin is soft and browned at the edges.
Step 3: Scoop the flesh off the skin into a Dutch oven. Squeeze the garlic out of its skins. Add the onion and stock.
Step 4: Simmer 5 minutes, then blend smooth with an immersion blender right in the pot.
Step 5: Stir in the cream and nutmeg. Taste, add salt, and thin with stock if it's too thick.
[Product name]
Blends soup in the pot. No hot liquid poured into a blender.
Check price on Amazon: Immersion blender (opens in a new tab)[Product name]
Enameled cast iron, 5–6 quart. Soups, stews, braises, bread.
Check price on Amazon: Dutch oven (opens in a new tab)Make it ahead, freeze it, vary it
The soup keeps four days in the fridge and three months in the freezer. Leave out the cream until you reheat, or it can split.
A spoon of red curry paste with the stock takes it somewhere else entirely. Toasted pumpkin seeds on top are the obvious garnish, and the right one.