Hot and Sour Pumpkin Soup
I have complained on more than one occasion about the saccharine nature of the pumpkin. Its flesh is a sweet, sickly mush, all too often over-spiced with cinnamon, then pureed to make that vile cloying liquid: Pumpkin Soup. Pumpkin Soup puts me off Halloween. I love Halloween, for perking up the dismal cold nights as autumn lurches towards winter, but all those well-meaning, sustainable, green, homebody-types blitzing up saucepans of orange-coloured, creamy, soupy muck, make me feel more trick than treat.
Worse still than boring and sweet pumpkin soup – the ubiquitous plat du jour of early November – is that utterly atrocious fine-dining habit some chefs have acquired of smearing a blob of pumpkin onto a plate and then plonking a bit of meat or even worse, fish, nearby. Those smeared squash-blobs always taste like pureed soggy cupcake. They cloud the palate with their sickly spiciness and make whatever else is on the plate into a fairly bland and irrelevant taste experience. Please, mighty Chefs, give it up! Put those palette knives down and stop smearing stuff. It’s hideous.
Yes pumpkin is truly horrible. No one really likes it. Pumpkin love can only be the result of one of those brainwashing conspiracies. When people say they like pumpkin I am suspicious of them. As I am when people begin liking really avant garde music ,or when young men wear those horrible Victorian beards. All these life choices I am sure, are the results of mass hysteria, rather than cool-headed judgment.
I considered a world without pumpkins, a world without their strange sprawling vines and gargantuan orange fruit, and I thought I would draw the line at suggesting we ban people from growing them. The world would be a poorer place visually without them. And everyone enjoys carving pumpkins up and making scary lanterns at Halloween.
I am a bit of a sustainable homebody (despite having being sneery about the practice in my first paragraph) and I do believe we shouldn’t waste things. So, after a lot of thought, and a lot of reading, I decided that the only way to redeem a pumpkin is to give it the Asian treatment. Hot and sour soup is wonderful. It is bright, it wakes your taste buds. It has a kick, a freshness and some floral flavours delivered by my beloved kaffir lime leaves and magical lemongrass. Mixed with pumpkin, hot and sour flavours remove the squash’s horrible sweetness sedating qualities and balance the richness of the pumpkin flesh with some light citrus notes. This soup is refreshing and warming at the same time –perfect for the chillier weather.
Squash Redeemer
1 small ‘eating’ pumpkin (sigh –why do we even have to have carving pumpkins. Surely we should be able to eat all pumpkins. So wasteful!) peeled and cubed
1 large onion, coarsely chopped
1 tablespoon chopped garlic
1 tablespoon chopped peeled fresh ginger
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 large glass dry white wine
300 ml vegetable stock
3 lemongrass stalks bashed around a bit with a rolling pin
3 small red chillis chopped (seeds removed if you are a baby sensitive to spice)
4 kaffir lime leaves
Juice of 1 lime
1 tablespoon sugar
Preparation
Place the onion, garlic, and ginger into a pan with 1 tablespoon oil, Turn the heat to medium and cook until the onion becomes soft. Add the pumpkin and wine and boil, uncovered, until wine starts evaporating, then stir in the stock and simmer, covered, until the pumpkin is tender (about 20 minutes). In a frying pan, heat the remaining oil over moderately high heat until hot but not smoking, then add the lemongrass and chillies stirring, until lightly browned for about 1 minute. Remove from heat. Purée the pumpkin mixture and return to pot. Add the lemongrass mixture, kaffir lime leaves, lime juice, and sugar to the liquid pumpkin and simmer, uncovered, for 20 minutes. Pour the soup through a sieve (which is actually a fairly major ball-ache, as the thick soup gets stuck in the mesh. So definitely do not pour it through the sieve too fast . Drip it through slowly. This requires (ugh) patience, but is worth it) then chuck away all the bits.The sour sweet liquid left will warm the blood and the heart.
hongkonggourmet 