Gypsy Soup is our favorite, hearty and delicious winter squash soup.
Soothing, warming, and intriguingly flavored with the sweetness of winter squash such as butternut squash, this winter squash soup is a hands down winner.
We first had the Gypsy Soup recipe years ago when a friend prepared it from the Moosewood cookbook, which may be the originators of it.
Personalize this Winter Squash Soup Recipe
With a perfect balance of sweet and savory, plus the mediterranean influence of olive oil, Gypsy soup is always delicious. Also versatile and forgiving, we’ve found that it’s easy to add or alter the ingredients to whatever you have on hand or the favorite veggies you’d like to include.
Our favorite winter squash to use for it is butternut squash and also, new to us this year from our own garden, red kuri squash, which tastes a lot like butternut squash. We also love to add sweet potatoes to ours, and chopped kale for some extra greens power.
If you have picky eaters, just try a handful chopped small and it almost looks like herbs and you can’t even taste the kale yet it adds valuable nutrients.
Substitutes and/or Additions
- Black beans
- Sweet potatoes
- purple
- orange
- Baby colored potatoes
- Carrots
- Eggplant
- Kale
- Roasted canned tomatoes
You can toss in any of these ingredients as variants to the basic recipe and it’s equally delicious. We use fresh garden tomatoes when our tomato harvest is coming in. Off season we like adding diced roasted canned tomatoes and minced roasted garlic for added flare.
If you have black garlic, try that as well.
Our garden harvest of eggplant are still coming in during fall at around the time the red kuri squash is ready. So we added chopped eggplant to the mix which adds body, nutrients and variety while acting as a carrier for the wonderful flavors. Plus eggplant is a very Mediterranean ingredient, so it’s a perfect addition.
Some of Our Favorite Squash for this Winter Squash Soup
We’re growing tetsukabuto and butternut squash in our garden, so our first harvest of winter squash was used for Gypsy Soup, our favorite winter squash soup recipe.
Bouillon, Broth and Soup Stock
When it comes to bouillon or soup stock, we prefer to buy it ready made from the grocer store. Of course if you have the time to make your own, that’s the best and healthiest you can find, especially if you’re using organic vegetables.
If you have an abundant garden, then that’s an easy thing to do. Our garden is small however, because we live in the woods and the patches of sun are slim. So it’s hard to use precious organics from the garden, or expensive organic veggies from the story, cook them up and toss them saving the broth. We’d just rather eat the fibrous veggies than toss them.
So our favorite broth to use is organic and without soy or yeast. That’s actually hard to find as most bouillons and broths have both since it adds extra flavor. But we have soy allergies plus need to be careful with candida inducing foods so we try to avoid the yeast as well.
Yeast and Soy Free Organic Broths
These are our favorite yeast and soy-free broths and these days you can find most of these in most grocers. The Pacific Organic Mushroom Broth is also good but the Organic Pacific Vegetable Broth also has mushrooms but other ingredients as well, so that’s our preferred.
Winter Squash Gypsy Soup
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup Olive Oil
- 4 cups Onions chopped
- 4 Cloves Garlic crushed
- 4 cups winter squash cut into bite sized pieces
- 1 large sweet potato cut into bite sized pieces
- 1 cup Celery chopped
- 2 cups Tomatoes chopped (fresh or canned)
- 1 1/2 cups Bell Peppers any color; we like red for extra color
- 3 cups Chickpeas cooked
- 6 cups Veggie broth
- 4 teaspoons Paprika
- 2 teaspoons Turmeric
- 2 teaspoons Basil
- 2 teaspoons Salt
- dash Cinnamon
- 2 Bay leafs
Instructions
- Chop all vegetables into small to medium bite-sized pieces
- In a soup pot sauté onions, garlic, celery, and sweet potatoes in the olive oil for about five minutes
- Add the seasonings and the vegetable broth and stir
- Simmer, covered for another 15 minutes
- Add remaining vegetables and chickpeas and cook for another 10 minutes, until all veggies are as tender as you like them
Notes
- For expediency, you can use canned chickpeas and tomatoes. During garden harvest season, you can use fresh tomatoes and also cook dried chickpeas.
- Use winter squash such as butternut or red kuri..
Nutrition
You may also enjoy this butternut squash recipe and another favorite, the go-back for seconds, creamy carrot curry soup.
Contact us!
However, we’d love to hear from you and glad to answer any questions, so feel free to drop us a line and let us know how your gypsy soup recipe turns out. Send photos and any comments and we’ll add them to this recipe!