Creamy Maple Bacon Pumpkin Soup
When the fall harvest rolls in, your local town's inn takes the opportunity to make a once per year dish using smooth pumpkin, cream, and crunchy maple bacon. Perfect for cozy meals with your adventuring party before heading out to deal with the ghosts at the haunted tavern.
Servings 6 adventurers
Calories 392kcal
Cost 20 gold
Equipment
- Large pot
- Baking sheet
- Blender (optional, but nice to have)
Ingredients
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 4 pounds total of sugar pie pumpkin
- 8 slices (or more) thick cut, maple bacon
- ½ large yellow onion chopped (finely chopped if not using a blender)
- ½ large red onion chopped (finely chopped if not using a blender)
- 8 medium garlic cloves minced
- ½ teaspoon sea salt
- ½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
- ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
- ⅛ teaspoon cloves
- ½ teaspoon ground black pepper
- 4 cups 32 ounces vegetable broth
- ½ cup heavy cream
- 4 tablespoons real maple syrup
- ¼ cup green pumpkin seeds
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 425 °F and halve your pumpkins.
- Scoop out the seeds and stringy bits from the inside of the pumpkin, leaving the smooth flesh with skin on.
- Halve the halves and rub olive oil on the flesh. Place skin side down on a baking sheet and bake for 35 to 40 minutes. They are done when a fork easily slides into the flesh.
- When the pumpkin is almost done baking, cook the bacon in a large pot over medium heat, leaving the grease to collect in the pot. Remove the bacon and set on a paper towel.
- Add the onions, garlic, and salt and cook for 8 minutes.
- Peel the skin from the pumpkin, it should come off easily just using your fingers. Reduce oven heat to 325 °F.
- Add the pumpkin, spices, and broth to the pot and begin to mash the pumpkin flesh using your spatula, spoon, shovel, sword, etc. If you have a blender you only need to break down the flesh to small chunks to ensure even cooking. If you aren't using a blender then just keep mashing.
- Bring to a boil then reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes. As soon as you begin the simmer, toss your green pumpkin seeds in some olive oil, place them on the baking sheet the pumpkin was on, and put in the 325 °F oven for the rest of the simmer time (about 13 minutes).
- Once the simmer is done, add your cream and syrup and turn off heat. Remove your seeds from the oven.
- If using a blender, blend the soup to your desired consistency, careful of pressure build up from the hot soup. Work in batches to prevent too much pressure or better yet just use an immersion blender.
- Serve into bowls and top with seeds and crumbled bacon.
- Resume adventuring!
Notes
This recipe is so cozy and warming, perfect for the advent of autumn and scary adventures. Offering a slight heat resistance and renewed energy, your adventuring party will be ready to tackle any zombie invasion, ghostly haunting, possession, or demon nearby. We loved the bacon touch on this classic recipe, tying in a broader feeling of a "harvest" soup and adding even more crunch on top of the seeds. At first we didn't think our lack of a blender would work out well but the pumpkin flesh gets so soft that mashing consistently while it simmered produced great results. We may even prefer the mashed version as we had a small amount of enjoyable texture to the soup we would have otherwise missed out on with the blender.
For a detailed nutrition info breakdown, head to the myfitnesspal link for our recipe here