Everyone has their own version of a pumpkin soup or butternut squash recipe, but I am playing around with sage in this one. A popular herb known for warding off evil spirits (or swaying the results of a football match), it is now being used to add an earthy aroma to every sip of this pumpkin dish.
This recipe is mainly using butternut pumpkin, but other pumpkins are welcomed. The focus is on the sage butter, because this is what enhances the flavor of the pumpkin. I have also added roasted Butifarra sausages in the soup, because I like to live life dangerously and enriching foods is my forte.
Butifarra is one of my favorite sausages well-known to Catalonia. You can eat it roasted or cured and, in this case, we are roasting them over green beans and cherry tomatoes. It is not easy to find Butifarra if you are not in Spain, so I would recommend just using regular sausages of your choice.
This pumpkin sage butter soup is a very rich and hearty dish but is so satisfying to the stomach, especially on a cold and rainy day!
*Note: All recipes are measured originally in grams.
| Prep Time | Cook Time | Total Time |
| 15 minutes | 60 minutes | 1 Hour and 15 Minutes |
Ingredients:
9 cloves of garlic unpeeled
¼ cup of butter
2 cups (500 g) raw butternut pumpkin
53 g butter (1/4 cup)
2 twigs of thyme
2 tablespoons or (30 g) of garlic
½ cup of heavy cream (18%)
½ cup of chicken broth
1 teaspoon of salt
A pinch of white pepper
Sides:
10-15 greenbeans¼ cup (32 g) cherry tomatos cut in half
4 Butifarra sausages or regular sausages
Soup Instructions:
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Set your oven to 200 C (or about 400 F) to prepare roasting the pumpkin.
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Next in a small saucepan, add the butter, thyme, sage, and garlic. Melt the butter on low heat (between the setting 3 and 4) and then set aside for 10 minutes. We do not want to brown the butter.
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If your pumpkin is not already cut up into big cubes then go ahead and deseed the pumpkin and cut it into four to six large pieces. No need to peel them, because it will be easier to remove the skin once the pumpkin is fully roasted.
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Afterwards, place the pumpkin in a bowl and add the sage butter and garlic mix that has been resting; massaging the butter all over the raw pumpkin.
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Next place a piece of parchment paper in a baking pan and set the pumpkin on top saving some of the excess butter in the bowl. Put the pan of your marinated pumpkin in the bottom rack of the oven and set the timer for 45 minutes.
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After 45 minutes, take a knife and poke the pumpkin. If it cuts like butter, it’s ready! Otherwise, leave it in another 5-10 minutes and continue checking until it cuts easily.
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Once your pumpkin is ready, take it out of the oven and let it cool for 10 minutes.
*If your pumpkin still has the outer layer, use a spoon to scoop out the flesh of the pumpkin. You can also remove the skin of the garlic at this point.
- After 10 minutes, place only the pumpkin, broth (or "caldo" as we call here), and about four peeled roasted garlic cloves in a blender. Purée the ingredients first, then pour the mix through a strainer into a pot to smoothen it more.
- Turn the pot on medium-low heat and start adding the cream, salt, and pepper. Start with one teaspoon of salt and taste before adding more; adding little pinches afterwards until it is to your taste.
Side Dish Instructions:
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Keeping the same bowl that was used to mix up the pumpkin and sage butter, throw in the Butifarra and green beans and mix around so they are well coated.
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Next heat a pan to medium-high heat adding a teaspoon of oil. Then start cooking the sausages first until the skin browns on all sides for about 5-10 minutes. Then remove the sausages from the pan into a separate oven pan.
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Without turning off your pan, lower the heat to medium, then cook the green beans constantly stirring around for two minutes. (You can even add more garlic, because you can never have too much garlic.)
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Once done, place the green beans in the same pan of the sausage along with the cherry tomatoes and roast in the oven for about 10-15 minutes or until the sausage is fully cooked.
Once you are done, you can either serve your sausages on the side of the soup or in my case, directly in the soup adding that extra meaty flavor. One thing I would like to note is that I started the sausages as soon as I put the pumpkin in the oven, so that I could time my sausages to be ready to serve once the soup was done.
I even took some of the roasted garlic and spread it on toast with olive oil, my breath hasn’t felt the same since.
Let me know how you feel about this recipe, leave comments if you have any suggestions or feedback!
