Winter weather means it’s time for three things: pumpkin spice, actual pumpkins, and warming, filling soups (pumpkin soups, even!). I don’t particularly enjoy pumpkin (or its spice) as a flavour, but soup is something I can ” and will ” fuck with (heavily).
Making soup is the simplest way to use up an excess of any one ingredient, and I happened to have many carrots. As we have mentioned before, a pressure cooker is the easiest and fastest route one can take for a big batch of creamy, piping hot soup.
You just sauté some aromatics, add a root vegetable or a squash and some broth, and pressure cook the heck out of it. Hit with a hand blender (all while leaving it in the cooker) and you have a perfect pureed soup. Heck, that thing will even keep it warm for you. Squash soups are fine and good, but carrots are ubiquitous, cheap and delightfully sweet. They’re also infinitely easier to break down than most squashes, a feature that will always win major points in my points book (which I keep under my pillow).
Turmeric is another very popular fall thing I’ve been seeing on Instagram ” usually in latte form ” and it happens to get along very well with carrots, garlic, and ginger, which is great news, because all of those ingredients were invited to the pressure cooker party.
This soup is incidentally vegan, not because I intended for it to be, but because I was out of duck fat and butter, so turned to olive oil. The only other non-vegan ingredient I had planned on using was chicken stock and making the switch to vegetable broth meant I could give some to my vegan friend, Ash, whom I had plans with that evening.
Anyway. If you really want to use an animal fat or stock, you know you will get no grief from me, but you really don’t need to. This soup is extremely savoury and flavourful as is. To make it, you will need:
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900 grams of carrots, roughly chopped into 5cm pieces
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3 tablespoons olive oil
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1 large shallot, sliced or diced
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1 white onion, sliced or diced
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1 5cm piece of ginger, washed and chopped (The skin can stay on.)
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1 tablespoon sesame oil
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6 cloves of garlic, smashed
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3cm piece of fresh turmeric, washed and chopped (The skin can stay on. Also: Maybe wear gloves when chopping if you don’t want yellow finger tips.)
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1/4 cup sherry vinegar
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A little bundle of your favourite herbs, tied with twine (I used 2 thyme sprigs, 2 marjoram sprigs, and one sprig of tarragon.)
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4 cups of vegetable stock
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1/2 cup nutritional yeast (This is optional; I really like the cheesy flavour it adds.)
Add the olive oil to the pressure cooker and turn it on. Add the shallot, onion and ginger, season with salt and pepper, and cook until the onions are soft and the bottom of the insert is almost covered in tasty, stuck-on browned goodness.
Add the sesame oil, turmeric, and garlic, and cook until the garlic is fragrant and golden on the edges. Add the sherry vinegar, and scrape up all the browned bits with a wooden spoon. Add the carrots, herbs, and stock, close the cooker, and press the “Pressure Cook” button or equivalent setting.
Cook on high pressure for seven minutes, then let it release naturally for 10 minutes before releasing the remaining pressure manually. (This will help reduce sputtering.)
Open up the pressure cooker, remove the herb bundle, and add the nutritional yeast. Blend it all up with a hand blender, until there are no chunks of any kind. You should have a very thicc soup at this point.
If you wish for a thinner soup, simply blend in some water, a quarter cup at a time, until you reach your desired soup viscosity. Garnish with croutons, fresh herbs, or pumpkin seeds, if you simply must be on trend.
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