Roast Garlic and Pumpkin Soup

Pumpkin soup is such a comfort food for me, right up there with apple crumble. It’s a food that wraps its warmth around you as you eat it - it’s a hug in a bowl. The other great thing about pumpkin soup, is there’s a type for everyone. Whether you want it fresh with a key lime or mix with red curry paste and chili.

You won’t find any of those things in this recipe though, as this pumpkin soup recipe goes right back to the basics, bringing simple but beautiful flavours together.

It’s also served best with lashings of cream and thick, fluffy white bread covered in melted butter.

Roast Garlic and Pumpkin Soup
Serves 4-6
Cook time: 1 & 1/2 Hours

Quarter of a large or half a small pumpkin.
1 bulb of garlic
2-3 Tablespoons olive oil
2 onions
2-3 large carrots
2 large potatoes
2-3 litres of stock (chicken or vegetable)
Cream (to serve)

Pre-heat the oven to 180°C, fan bake. While the oven is heating up, cut the pumpkin into wedges and space evenly over a baking dish. With your bulb of garlic, remove the cloves, keeping the skins on, and spread them around the pumpkin. Drizzle with oil olive and mix through - make sure everything is nicely coating in the before adding any salt and pepper.

Once the oven has reach 180°C, place the baking dish in the oven and roast for 45 minutes to an hour. Remove from the oven and leave to cool. While this is cooling, get a large pot and place it on the stove – do not turn it on.

Roughly chop the carrots, potatoes and onions and place in the pot. Slice the skin off the roasted pumpkin and add to the pot also. This should be very easy now that the pumpkin is cooked and softened.

Cover the vegetables with the stock. When it comes to the thickness of your soup, this completely comes down to how much liquid you put in. Rule of thumb, if you want a runnier soup, make sure the vegetables are just fully submerged. If you’re wanting a thicker soup, leave the vegetables showing by around 2cm.

Turn the heat on medium and start pealing the garlic. The reason I do this last is because otherwise those little cloves of garlic are like lava when trying to remove them from their casings. The best way to do this is cut one of the ends off and squeeze all the goodness through. This is a lot easier with the bigger cloves and often, if the smaller ones are too fiddley, I’ll just leave them out.

Once all the garlic (or all the garlic you can be bothered getting out) is in the pot, stir, turn down to low and cover. Leave this to cook for around 20-30 minutes. When all the vegetables have softened, turn off the heat and with a hand-held blender, blend everything together. You could pour this into an actual blender, but I find a hand-held one both easier to use makes cleaning up easier.

When the soup is nice and smooth, it’s ready to serve. You can easily eat as is, but I love to add cream, a good handful of cheese and sometimes even a sprinkling of parsley. If I’m making this for a family meal, I’ll bring it to the table with all three of those (and chili for Adam) so people can help themselves and put whichever they want.

If you’re trying to save time, you can also just cook everything on the stove top opposed to baking it in the oven first, but roasting the garlic and pumpkin creates a completely different flavour. I also find a difference between leaving the skins on the potatoes and removing them. I personally prefer them off with this soup. If you make it, let me how it went and if you did anything differently.