Jackson Boxer’s vegetarian recipe for brown butter pumpkin soup

The base of this easy roast pumpkin soup is rich, nutty, Halloween heaven – you can go wild with the garnishes

A lot of my early life in professional kitchens was spent making vegetable purees, which I find rather tiresome, not least because they can often lapse into baby food: creamy, bland and flattened by a cosseting blanket of dairy. With a judicious and considered approach, however, they can also be incredibly vivid, explosive and concentrated expressions of the very essence of the vegetable in question. I love this seasonal (not to mention Halloween-appropriate) soup for its simplicity of approach – essentially, you just roast a beautiful pumpkin with caramelised butter – and the remarkable complexity of its result.

Brown butter pumpkin soup

When browning butter, always bear in mind that it has a high water content, and that the initial seething cook is done to evaporate this – until all the water has cooked out, you won’t get the butter high enough above 100C for the milk solids and sugars to caramelise. That’s why browning butter happens two ways, like Hemingway’s bankruptcy – gradually, then suddenly. And pay close attention, or it will burn and you’ll have to start again.

Prep 5 min Cook 1 hr Serves 4

250ml vegetable bouillon (homemade, ideally; see my recipe last week) 1 delica pumpkin (800g), cut in half, deseeded and peeled (I don’t bother peeling it, but cooked pumpkin skin is an acquired taste) 250g butter 10g flaky sea salt (about 2 tsp) Sherry vinegar , to taste