Sometimes the best recipes come from places where you least expect them. This easy pumpkin soup, an all-time family favorite, was found in a flyer that I picked up at a gas station.
This recipe is easy to prepare and very delicious. It may not be the fanciest pumpkin soup recipe, but you can make it in just a couple of steps, and it’s sure to warm you up on a cold autumn or winter afternoon.
A Few Words on the Ingredients
- You should weigh your pumpkin after peeling and cleaning it. The original recipe called for 500 grams, but you’re good to go with 1 lb or 1.1 lbs. That’s about a quarter of a regular-sized pumpkin.
- You don’t need to roast or cook the pumpkin beforehand. Use raw pumpkin: peel it, remove the seeds, and cut it into cubes with a sharp kitchen knife. The pumpkin will cook in the soup as part of this recipe.
- You can use vegetable or chicken stock instead of water; it will definitely make your pumpkin soup tastier. But in my opinion, this is not necessary. Even just using water, the flavors will turn out very nice and round in this recipe.
- Use salt, ground black pepper, and ground nutmeg according to your taste.
- For a faster version, add the leeks with the pumpkin at the beginning. This way, they cook together, and it only takes 30 minutes.
What to Do with the Excess Pumpkin
About a quarter of a regular pumpkin is all you need for this pumpkin soup. So you might ask what you should do with the excess or leftover pumpkin. Here are a few ideas:
- Cut it into larger chunks and bake them as you would any baked pumpkin.
- Make some homemade pumpkin purée that you can use in a lot of recipes, like these yummy pumpkin muffins.
- Dice the rest and freeze it in a Ziploc bag or a regular plastic container. It’s just plain pumpkin, so it will last for a year in your freezer. This way, you’ll be able to cook this yummy pumpkin soup any time of year.
Easy Pumpkin Soup
Ingredients
- 1 lbs pumpkin 500 g
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 1 medium onion
- 2 leeks
- 2 cloves garlic
- 1 ⅔ cups water 400 ml
- 1 ⅓ cups heavy cream 320 ml
- salt
- ground black pepper
- nutmeg
Instructions
- Prepare the veggies. Chop the onion and garlic, cut the leeks into thin rounds. Peel the pumpkin, remove the seeds and cut into 1 inch cubes.
- Start sautéing the onion in a pot with the olive oil over medium heat. Add the garlic and pumpkin cubes after 5 minutes and continue cooking without adding any liquids for 2-3 minutes.
- Add water, salt, ground black pepper and nutmeg. Cook for 30 minutes over low, until the pumpkin gets soft.
- Add the cream and the leek and purée it in a blender, food processor or with an immersion blender. Cook for another 10 minutes to take out the raw flavor of the leek.
- Serve warm. It is good as is, or sprinkle with spring onions and add fresh ciabatta or baguette.
The Strange Story of the Pumpkin Soup Recipe
A couple of years ago, I found a flyer at a gas station that also operated a restaurant chain. The flyer itself was pumpkin-shaped, and it contained a couple of their pumpkin recipes.
We took one just out of curiosity and because it looked good, but I didn’t even think about reading it. Somehow, we ended up trying a couple of the recipes, including this easy pumpkin soup.
The funniest thing is that the original recipe didn’t even have leeks in it. It only had spring onions sprinkled on top of the soup at the end, but our version was a translation, and the translator had made a mistake. They had translated spring onions as leeks, and I didn’t understand how on earth you could sprinkle leeks on top of your soup.
But anyhow, I sliced the leeks and put them into the soup, and it turned out to be delicious. So what you can read here is an adaptation of the original recipe, created by coincidence. I hope you like this easy pumpkin soup recipe as much as we like it.
