Pumpkin Soup with Porcini Mushrooms
Northern Italians call soups like this vellutate — velvety — and serve them in small portions at the start of a meal. This one leans on pumpkin and carrot browned in olive oil before any liquid arrives; those caramelized edges are the difference between a soup with depth and one that simply tastes of boiled squash.
The milk does something that puzzles people at first: 500 g of pumpkin (about a pound) simmers in 800 ml of milk, and then half of it is poured away. That isn’t waste. Milk tempers the pumpkin’s sweetness and lends creaminess, but the full amount would leave the soup thin and dairy-heavy, so broth takes over from there. If you want genuinely silky texture, push the blended purée through a sieve — pumpkin fibres are short, but you feel them.
The topping is a small dish of its own. Sliced porcini brown with rosemary, and only at the end does a spoonful of breadcrumbs join them, soaking up the oil and mushroom juices and staying crisp over the last three or four minutes. Thawed porcini are milder than fresh; cremini do the job with a quieter flavor. The purée keeps a day in the fridge, but make the crumb fresh — soggy, it has no point.
Part of Italian cuisine — 33 more recipes in the section.
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Ingredients
Instructions
Peel the onion, pumpkin, and carrot and cut them into rough pieces. Heat olive oil in a deep saucepan and saute the vegetables until golden.
Pour in the milk and cook until the vegetables are fully tender. Then drain off half the milk, add the broth (or water) to the pot along with the leaves from 1 sprig of rosemary, bring to a boil, and cook for about another minute.
Take the soup off the heat, season with salt and pepper, and blend to a puree. For a perfectly smooth result, pass it through a sieve as well.
Slice the mushrooms and brown them in a pan in olive oil along with the remaining sprig of rosemary. Add the breadcrumbs to the pan, season with salt and pepper, mix with the mushrooms, and fry for another 3-4 minutes until the mushrooms are done.
Ladle the soup into bowls, top with a little of the porcini, and serve.
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