Sopressa chips on pumpkin soup

Sopressa is cut into thick slices and eaten with bread: that's how we know it. But sliced thin and put in the oven it becomes something else, a chip that crunches. On a pumpkin soup, in autumn, it's a dish you won't expect. This isn't a traditional recipe: it's an idea to try.

Sweet and salty, smooth and crunchy

Pumpkin is sweet, and the soup is smooth and soft. Sopressa brings what it's missing: salt, the scent of spices, and the crunch. One broken chip on top, and every spoonful changes.

What you need

For four bowls:

• a kilo of pumpkin with firm, sweet flesh, already cleaned;
• an onion and a potato;
• about a litre of vegetable stock;
• eight or ten thin slices of sopressa;
• a handful of pumpkin seeds and a few sage leaves;
• extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper.

Step by step

1. The soup: soften the chopped onion in a little oil over a low heat. Add the pumpkin and the potato in pieces, cover with hot stock and cook for about twenty minutes, until soft. Blend it all: if it's too thick, add a ladle of stock; if it's too thin, a few more minutes on the heat. Go easy on the salt: the sopressa on top is already full of flavour.
2. Thin slices: this time, unlike usual, the sopressa should be sliced thin, one or two millimetres, with a long sharp knife. Take the skin off first: here's how to cut sopressa.
3. In the oven: lay the slices on a tray lined with baking paper, without overlapping, and bake at 180 °C for eight to ten minutes, until the fat turns translucent and the edges curl. Keep an eye on them: there's not much between golden and burnt. Out of the oven they turn crisp in a couple of minutes, as they cool.
4. Seeds and sage: toast the pumpkin seeds in a dry pan until they pop. In the same pan, with a little oil, crisp up the sage leaves.
5. The sopressa fat: a little of the fat from the slices is left on the baking paper, full of flavour. Instead of oil, a teaspoon of it on the soup.
6. In the bowl: the soup piping hot, the chips on top, whole or broken, the seeds, the sage and a grind of pepper. Add the chips at the last moment: in the soup they soften quickly.

With salame too

Salame works too: it makes smaller chips, to put on whole. And the chips on their own, with a glass of wine, are already an aperitivo.

If you try them, tell us how the dish turned out when you come by the shop.