Pumpkin Soup cooking demonstration, Simply Paleo episode with Ayelet Connell PhD

hello my name is al O'Connell and they're paleo and gluten-free chefs and this is an episode of simply paleo with me and today being fall and beautiful beautiful weather crisp crisp season this morning there's frost on my car it's all things pumpkin pumpkin is definitely symbolic of the fall season and in New England it's a big part of our culture so today we're going to be making pumpkin soup and pumpkin soup is a wonderfully nourishing fragrant fall soup but what's wonderful about this recipe is there's a lot of variations on the theme that you can make to mix it up and still use the basic same recipes so today we're going to be using it sugar pumpkin which is essentially a small type of pumpkin that's a little bit sweeter in flavor and we're gonna be using apple and some autumn seasoning like cinnamon and nutmeg and allspice and some ground cloves and some onion and some chicken stock and a little bit of maple syrup it's a very simple recipe and very easy to make so I did a little prep before you join me this morning just so that we don't have a lot of extra time involved in between the steps so the first thing I did is I have my big stew pot here that's on the stove and I put about a tablespoon or two of olive oil in and heated up medium heat and I took an onion you could use a small onion a large I mean it doesn't matter really depends on the flavor profile that you prefer I usually do a medium to small onion and I chopped it up I cut it I peeled it I chopped it into small pieces and I put it in the oil looks it was hot and I caramelized the onions and so you just want them to be nice and soft and translucent and you can smell that caramelized onion smell in the air too and you give definitely the pumpkin soup a little bit more of a hearty flavor but it is somewhat of a sweet soup so it gives you a nice robust flavor but the reason the size of the matter so much is because if the end we're going to be blending the soup to give it a nice puree and silky texture so though I'll answer already caramelized that I have it on low so it wouldn't be bothered with too much of the noise now I'm just raise the temperature a little bit now what I did earlier which is really helpful is to take a pumpkins I'm going to go through the steps with you so a sugar pumpkin is about this size so you need one of these for the soup and what you want to do is pick the San Juans which be a little bit careful when you so large knife if you want to be a little careful because a little tough to do and then once you take the stem off you can cut a pumpkin in half from top to bottom and then what you want to do is take the seeds out so you see that the inside of the cavity is filled with pumpkin seeds or Fitbit does so what I want to do is take it out you'll see on this side I just used a spoon to remove the seeds and I literally just try to scrape a little bit further than where the seeds reside on the inner layer and then just scoop them out so I'll show you with this one how to do that you can see where the seeds are so what I do is I kind of dig a little bit about half you can see how I'm doing that around where the seeds are a little bit into the meat as well just to make it easier so I don't feel like I have to scrape the seeds and then nice and easily they come out and then what I'm gonna do is just star of the seeds and if you want to make roasted pumpkin seeds is a great recipe on my blog on simply paleo calm where you take the pumpkin seeds so make sure that they're nice and dry and you can mix them with a little bit of oil and season it and in my case I use some salt and a little bit of pepper and some paprika and then you just put it in the oven at about 350 degrees on some parchment paper make sure that it's spread out in a thin flat layer and roast um but you have to keep monitoring which shouldn't take more than about 10 it's but if you started to hear them popping then they can definitely get close to burning and so they didn't want to be able to lower the oven if they're not all roasted yet or turn off the oven in Sigma okay so how do you remove the season either discarded them or set them aside to you to make them into rusyn seeds you can see the empty cavity so I have here a tray a metal tray and the oven is preheated at 425 degrees which is a good temperature to roast winter squash boards and what I'm going to do is I'm going to sprinkle a little bit of salt on and I always like to use sea salt because with a lot of wonderful minerals in it but I'm not too concerned about sodium levels with sea salt and then what I'm gonna do is take a mixture of about a half a teaspoon of cinnamon 1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg and then like a pinch of ground cloves and some allspice you could do more than that if you want but I'm literally just gonna sprinkle this on the open space of the pumpkin to get a nice coating okay you can see it's just nice and well-seasoned and then I'm gonna take a little bit of olive wood it can take regular olive oil or you can take an olive oil spray just try not forget it in your face and just push the inside oil and then the last step for this part is we're going to take the pumpkin and we're gonna put it facedown on parchment paper and then we're gonna take it and we're gonna put it in the oven remember it 425 and what you want to do is cook it takes about a half an hour at 425 but it kind of varies depending on the size of your pumpkin and you don't have to use a sugar pumpkin but they're just a little bit sweeter and a little bit easier to manage and then what you're gonna do is when you how you know the pumpkins ready is it take a fork and you try to puncture it through the outer skin of the pumpkin and if it goes through very easily and you can smell that smell the pumpkin and it's sizzling a little bit on the bottom line you know it's red and you can take it out cool but for the suit typically when I do winter squash like butternut squash acorn squash I typically just peel it and cut it in half take out the seeds and discard them and then I chop it up into big chunks and I just put it in a soup that way I don't roast it in advance but with a pumpkin the skin is so thick it's really hard to peel and this is just a great way to do it it makes the soup process a little bit quicker so today's about a half an hour to cook but I did another pumpkin earlier just so that we would have to wait that amount of time and I want to show you how it looked so this is essentially the pumpkin that's been roasted and you can see how it's nice and dark in color from the cinnamon that is so fragrant beautiful and it's literally starting to come out of the skin so as you can see when I started to do is I took the meat out of one half and now let's do it I'm just gonna add it to here to this bowl and this literally is simple it's just scooping it out of the peel and it is so fragrant the smells I can just smell those an extra seat here cinnamon nutmeg cloves the allspice it is so wonderful it definitely makes me think of all the pluses of the policies and the frost is the negatives for sure my car this morning that my husband very sweetly got rid of and when I went out this morning picked the kids to school I noticed that the frost had been scraped and I thought to call and say thanks victim kisses the phone so here's my pumpkin so the next step I have the onions caramelize and now what I'm going to do is put the pumpkin in and I'm going to put some chicken broth in this it's about a quart now the amount of chicken broth that you use is really dependent how much company huh and how thick or thin you want the soup so typically I'll do a quart of chicken broth and I'll do about the two cups of water the water I might reduce depending on how thick roots I want the suit put the chicken broth in the Cupid chapter because I want the broth to come and the soup to come to a boil before I leave it to simmer I'm going to add the water in as well and this is topstitch water honey and then I want to do is take an apple if it's a really nice sweet somewhat tart flavor also added to the pumpkin soup so generally what I'll do is I'll just peel the Apple and cut around the core to start the core just chop it in chunks and put it in so I've already done that so you can see that they're just pretty big chunks it really doesn't matter because once it's nice and soft from the boiling of the broth then we're just gonna blend it with an immersion blender so I'm gonna add the apples in now when I do this type of soup with winter squash like butternut squash or acorn squash then typically I'll add seasoning to the suit instead of putting it right on the squash you think if this hasn't been roasted so in that case I'll do about a teaspoon or a half a teaspoon of cinnamon I'll do a half a teaspoon or a quarter teaspoon of nutmeg and I love doing a quarter teaspoon of allspice and about a pinch of cloves and then I'll typically do about a teaspoon of salt but in this case we put some salt on the pumpkin already so I'm gonna put about 1/4 teaspoon of salt in the soup in addition and you know you think that's a sweet food salt always seems to make it a little bit sweeter because I think it helps to make the flavors more robust so then the last ingredient which I typically wait it's a nice hot hot I typically wait until it's boiling it can maple syrup and the maple syrup it's about a quarter I just found a little seed in here a quarter cup of maple syrup so I have that ready and waiting here in my little bowl and as it comes up into a boil then I'm gonna add the maple syrup and then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna bring it up to a boil and then I've didn't lower it to a simmer and I'm just gonna let it cook until the apples are fork tender literally can be switched to the fork and then I know that it's well uncooked and then what I'll do is take it off the burner and let it cool a little bit and then if you have an immersion blender that's always easiest now I have a commercial immersion blender this week we lovingly termed it as our boat motor at home and what I love about it is its metal and I don't have to do a lot of cleaning but also I'm not exposing plastic to heat in anything that I'm eating which is really important because there's a lot of toxins that can get to your body from keeping up plastic so I'll use the immersion blender which is very simple I'll just plug it in and I'll stick it in the soup make sure it's submerged and then I just turn it on high until everything it's really silky and texture but if you don't have an immersion blender which is fine then what you can do is let the soup cool and then put it into your blender and blend the soup and then it's ready to go and nice and delicious so this is coming up to a boil so I'm gonna take the maple syrup and I'm gonna pour the maple syrup and I'm just gonna stir it and then I'm just gonna let it continue to boil a little bit to get everything incorporated and then I'm gonna lower it to simmer and then I'm just gonna let it cook for a while it might take an hour so maybe half an hour depends on how high the simmer is until everything's really soft and then you can use the immersion blender or let it cool completely put it into the blender flex it up and there you have your soup and I will say that this soup is delicious the day after we'll treat very nourishing and the only you can do as you can garnish the soup which I'll show you the moment with a little bit of roasted pumpkin seeds I want to show you you can do this with whole pumpkin seeds but generally I like to just use raw pumpkin seeds that are inside that have been essentially shell so you can see here that these have been roasted so I literally just took the rocket peethas and I put them in a bowl and mixed in about a tablespoon or half a tablespoon of olive oil and I put a little bit of sea salt I like to use coarse sea salt with this type of thing so I put in some coarse Himalayan sea salt and a little bit of paprika and I just laid it out on baking sheet on a low baking tray and I put it on parchment paper in the oven at about 350 degrees and I roasted it for about 10 minutes and then it was ready to go and so this is a delicious thing to garnish your soup with but also great to put on salads or to eat as a little treat in the middle of the day as a snack pumpkin seeds are so happy there's so many wonderful antioxidant and then that's fiber this delicious fats and they're just great for all kinds of different phytonutrients in the body I have a wonderful recipe in on my vlog from LTC cauliflower bread that uses pumpkin seed flour which is literally hanging hot pumpkin seeds putting them in the food processor at the blender and making them into a coarse meal and it is such a wonderful bread and so rustic but super nutritious as well so let me show you what the actual soup looks like when it's all done so here we have see it's a nice thick beautiful pumpkin soup and it is so nourishing and fragrant the cinnamon and nutmeg and allspice and cloves it's just wonderful and what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to put a little bit of pumpkin seeds in the center as a garnish which makes it so beautiful and then I'm going to take a little bit of sweet paprika there's a great store in our area Kenzie's and they do have a national catalog you can find them online really great quality spices for your kitchen a lot of professional chefs use it as well they're pretty affordable but they're so well made and they really last for a while very very good quality so this is the Hungarian style sweet paprika which I use a lot in my kitchen and I used it to roast the pumpkin seeds with but I'm also going to sprinkle a little bit over my soup and you can just see how beautiful that looks pumpkin seeds in there paprika mmm oh that is just so delicious that pumpkin is so luxurious and texture it's really silky but also it's there you can definitely taste the cinnamon the allspice and not make the cloves just melted together to make this beautiful just fragrance and the seeds or the crunch and a little bit of saltiness it is a really wonderful soup and definitely something to welcome your family at home on a cold day so I highly recommend that you try this it's a really simple recipe remember that you can make all kinds of variations on a theme you can use butternut squash you can use an acorn squash you can add a little sweet potatoes in the carrot you can switch out the apples for pear which makes a nice little bit of a change in sweet and tart flavor but it's a wonderful soup and the biggest concept if it's particularly not the pumpkin is you're gonna peel it you're gonna cut it in half and take out the seeds and then you're gonna chop up into cubes and put it in over the onion and the apple or the pear and you're gonna cover it with chicken broth and flip it of water and put in your seasoning and then you're gonna bring it up to a boil and once it starts boiling you can lower to a simmer and just let it sit you're gonna stir it every now and then and once everything is really soft and Forks motional and you know it's ready and then you can use your immersion blender to blend it into that smooth silky consistency or just let it cool and I put it into your blender it makes the most wonderful wonderful suit so I highly recommend that you try this it's definitely paleo because there's no grating is no leg you just no sugar there's no dairy if you do want a little bit more of a creamy consistency you can definitely put a copper 1/2 a cup of coconut milk in and that will definitely make it a little bit of a different flavor profile you can add a little bit of creating that coconut milk and gift a little bit of a Thai flavor there's lots and lots of options but I hope you try it and I hope you visit my blog simply paleo comm because there's a ton of wonderful recipes and strategies and tips on how to incorporate paleo lifestyle into your life and how to do it easily and also to just remind you that I love requests be the requests to something they even wanted to eat forever if you haven't able to tolerate it and you've got when you're looking for a good healthy substitute or just your wish list of things that you'd love for me to do demonstrations live I'd love to hear from you so thanks so much for joining .

Video Description:

In this Simply Paleo episode with Ayelet Connell PhD, she demonstrates how to make delicious Pumpkin Soup-- a perfect fall dish! For more videos and to learn more about the Paleo diet and Ayelet, check out her blog at www.simplypaleo.com.

January 13, 2021 Tags : dairy free , gluten free , Paleo , Paleo Diet , pumpkin , sugar free , Video

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