Roasted Pumpkin Soup - Deep Flavour, Four Ingredients

A template demo soup page - the format a recipe site uses for a one-technique dish where the whole result hangs on a single decision: roast, do not boil.

Roasting is the recipe

Boiled pumpkin tastes like wet vegetable. Roasted pumpkin caramelises its natural sugars, and those browned edges are the entire flavour base - the soup needs no cream, no stock cubes, no sugar. Cut wedges, toss with oil, and roast at 200 degrees Celsius for thirty minutes without stirring; the onion and unpeeled garlic go on the same tray and squeeze out of their skins afterwards.

The method

1. Roast the pumpkin, onion, and garlic as above until the edges darken.
2. Scoop the flesh into a pot, squeeze the garlic out of its skins, add the onion.
3. Pour in hot stock and blend directly in the pot until completely smooth.
4. Season, heat through, and serve - a thread of cream or toasted seeds on top if you like.

The hot-stock rule

Cold stock shocks the blend and dulls the flavour the same way cold milk dulls coffee. Heat the stock before it meets the pumpkin - it costs nothing and it is the difference between soup that tastes bright and soup that tastes thin. Weeknight pairing: a bowl of this plus the tomato garlic pasta feeds four comfortably. The banana bread on this site is the sweet counterpoint that survives the same three-day window. And when the savoury phase ends, the chocolate chip cookies dough chills happily while the soup roasts.