Do you know what a pumpkin tastes like?  I'm referring to the flavor of the pure unadulterated gourd.  I know you know what pumpkin pie spice tastes like, but what about the vegetable plain?  One cannot taste apple in an apple pie if cinnamon is left out of the recipe-- our palettes are trained to operate this way.  As I delved into the savory side of pumpkin this past weekend, I started to wonder if my palette was trained in a similar manner.

The Album, Au Pied De Cochon, by Martin Picard, is one of my all time favorite books.  It's a wonderful montage of the famous Canadian restaurant, now translated in English, and available for US dollars.  All but a handful of recipes feature foie gras, but that doesn't mean they can't be done sans, inspire, or induce salivation.  Since [pie] pumpkins are in season, I decided to do an interpretation of the book's pumpkin soup.  There's no foie gras this time, as that would make for an expensive test run.

In short, the soup is made by removing the seeds (and goop) from two pumpkins; then filling the now empty shells with onion, garlic, rosemary, salt, pepper, and oil; wrapping in foil; and roasting in the oven for an hour.  When the flesh is tender, remove the rosemary, place the fillings in a pot over the stove, blend with the flesh of one pumpkin, mix in half[ish] cup of stock, touch of cream, re-season, then pour into the the other pumpkin, which should be intact.  Garnish with seared foie gras if you have it, and a raw turnip salad of olive oil, salt, pepper, and flat leaf parsley.

This yields a pretty cool, potentially inexpensive, high yield dish.  My issue with it is, I couldn't really taste the pumpkin.  I could taste the rosemary and 10 cloves of garlic, but otherwise the squash tasted very generic, and unidentifiable.  

I did use pie pumpkins for this dish, and I'm aware they could have potentially not been quite ripe yet, but I'm more willing to bet that the pumpkin taste I was expecting wasn't there because there was no pumpkin pie spice, or sweetener.

The next time I make the dish, I'm not going to concern myself with the pumpkin bowl presentation.  While visually stunning, it prohibits proper caramelization to occur in the oven, due to the foil.  Without the foil, the outside of the gourd would surely turn brown or black, and no longer be presentable.  However, without any color, it is much more difficult to build base flavors, which are crucial for soups.

Since I'm a flavor-first kind of guy, I'm going to remove the flesh of the pumpkin, and turn it into a large dice.  This I will toss with oil, salt, pepper, rosemary, or whatever else I desire, and roast the pieces in the oven like I would potatoes.

Once the pumpkin is properly colored and roasted, I will puree the mixture with stock, potentially of the pork variety and/or home-made, and give it another tasting.  Assuming the roasting properly brought out more of the pumpkin's natural sugars, there should be a more enhanced pumpkin flavor.  Or not.