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Baked Potato Soup
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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.