Creamy and chunky, ready for whatever weather: Baked Potato Soup

A mix of baked and simmered potatoes gives this soup a satisfying texture and real baked potato flavor. Recipe below.

A LOT OF BAKED POTATO SOUP RECIPES DO NOT INVOLVE BAKED POTATOES. They are simply an excuse to load your regular potato soup with cheese, sour cream, bacon and whatever you personally would add to a loaded baked potato. Here, though, we wanted to go a little farther. We wanted to use actually baked potatoes. But we also wanted the smooth, healthy, satisfying foundation that you only get from simmered potatoes.

Even with the extra step of baking some of the potatoes, this is still a simple dish. And preparing potatoes two ways gives this soup a distinctive flavor different from most potato soups. You really can taste the baked potato in here.

A soup like this is nice to have for these transitional times of year—the weather churn. Yesterday, we took a post-vaccination drive to Indiana Dunes National Park and walked for miles on the beach in the glorious sun. Today, the wind is howling bitterly outside and snow is on the way. Our friend Chris calls this Second False Spring. A good soup is just the ticket right now.

You can make this soup with water or with chicken stock or with half of each. It is very good indeed made simply with water, which is how we made ours. Also, keep in mind that any potato soup always tastes better the next day, and even better than that two days out.

The chives you see on here are from. our. garden. I went out in the yard to pick up all sorts of weird things that have landed out there, plastic bags, crinkly wrappers, flyers from pizza places, chunks of styrene, a faded store receipt. I was gathering up the junk and poking among the leaves and dead stalks, snooping in this hopeful, nosy way. Lots of little green things are pushing up out of the ground. Among them: the smallest beginning of the chives. After all we’ve all been through this last year, it was the sight of those brave small pointed leaves that really hit me. I just stood and looked at them for two or three minutes. I felt like I was seeing the first avatar of a new world, and a signal from an eternal one. And I was.

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Baked Potato Soup

Course Soup

Servings 4

Ingredients

• 2 8-ounce Idaho potatoes for baking
• 3 8-ounce Idaho potatoes for boiling
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 carrot, peeled and finely chopped
• 1/3 cup chopped celery
• 1 medium onion, peeled and chopped
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• salt
• 3 cups water or half water and half chicken stock
• 1/2 cup sour cream
• sharp cheddar cheese, cubed (optional)
• 1 tablespoon fresh chopped chives or green part of scallion

Instructions

• Bake two of the potatoes—we like to bake ours this way, starting them in the microwave. When they are cool enough to handle, cut them in half. Scoop out the flesh and reserve it. Reserve the baked skin, too—don’t throw it out or, if you are me, don’t just sit down and eat it with a bunch of salt.
• Meanwhile, take the other 3 potatoes, the raw ones, peel them and cut into 1-inch cubes.
• Heat the olive oil in a heavy medium-sized saucepan. Add the carrots and celery and sauté for three minutes. Add the onions and sauté another two minutes. Then add the garlic and sauté another minute.
• Add the raw potato cubes and enough water (or water and stock) to cover—I used 3 cups. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer and cover.
• After six or seven minutes, take half of the baked potato and add to the simmering soup. Coarsely chop the baked potato skin and put it into your blender.
• Cook the soup until the potato cubes are cooked through (but not mushy soft).
• Cool for about 15 minutes. Put about 2/3 of the soup in the blender along with the baked skins and whirl until everything is smooth. (Make sure to reserve some of the solids! One of the nice things about this soup is that it is smooth AND chunky.) If the puréed soup is too thick, more like a paste than a soup, then add a little water or stock. Then return it to the saucepan and stir everything together.
• If you intend to let the flavors mellow overnight, cover the soup and refrigerate it.
• If you intend to serve it right away, start heating it. When it is heated to your taste, carefully add in 1/2 cup of sour cream, gently whisk together and salt to taste.
• Ladle it into bowls and add your preferred garnishes. We used a modest amount of very sharp cheddar cut into small cubes and the fresh chives. We really did not feel the need to include bacon or other garnishes.
• If you refrigerate soup that already has sour cream in it, reheat it gently so the sour cream will not break.

Kitchen Notes

How do you top your baked potatoes? These other toppings would also work, although honestly we loved just using the cheddar cheese and the chives: finely chopped scallions instead of chives, bacon, chopped fresh tomato, half and half instead of sour cream, chopped parsley, diced pickled jalapeno, chopped hard-boiled egg, feta cheese instead of cheddar, sliced olives, diced avocado…

Water v. stock. We used water in this recipe, but you can substitute part or all with chicken stock. I would not use other stocks—not beef, vegetable or mushroom.

Liz’s Crockery Corner. We have plenty of cups and saucers, but we can always use another soup plate. We were delighted to find this one online last month. This dish was made by William Ridgways & Co., one of the great Staffordshire potteries. It’s an example of the kind of transferware that’s called polychrome, in which a pattern is fancied up by applying extra colors, before glazing, by hand. The polychrome technique has been around a long time, but for 19th century transferware, polychrome was a way to add extra dash to these mass-produced industrial exports.

This kind of china is also called pearlware—a catchall term describing the type of clay (fine and white) and the glaze—clear, with a faint blue tinge.  One thing I love about this type of glazing is that the colors remain fine over years and years. This plate was made some time between 1838 and 1845, and look how pure the colors are—as fresh and lively as the day they came out of the kiln.

Finally, already by 1800, pottery makers in England were churning out huge amounts of china for England, and especially for America and Canada. But they hadn’t got to the point in time where their designs had names. We have dishes made later in the century with names like Ayr, Monarch, Indus and Alleghany. The name of this design is: Pattern 629.