Cheesy Baked Potato Soup Recipe from Scratch - with a little extra SMOKY flavor!

We took everything you love about a baked potato, and we made a smoky, cheesy baked potato soup, perfect for the fall. If you guys wanna see this, here we go. All right, to get started, we have one block of sharp cheddar cheese. We're gonna cold smoke it using a smoke tube. So what's that mean? Basically, we're gonna use our smoking pecan pellets, our pellet of choice, no doubt. Simple enough, find your smoke tube. We can have one link listed below. It's not the exact one, but most of them do a pretty good job. And we're just gonna fill the tube up. Simple enough, you're gonna find a torch or a lighter or something, and just light your pellets. Plenty of oxygen. You want this burned for maybe five minutes before you even close the lid. Just if you're not aware of never seen this before, the grill is not on. This is just the actual smoke tube itself. Is this winter gonna be the time that we finally make chocolate creme brulee on the channel? Now that you've got your creme brulee torch out? If that's what you want, honey. You're the boss. All right, smoke tube's lit. In about five to eight minutes, somewhere through there. I've got my smoke tube over here because I got my draft rolling this way. So I'm gonna check the cheese right there, close the lid, and go to about an hour or two hours. As long as the smoke tube's rolling, we're good. All right, our cheese is cold smoking, rocking right along. We're going to throw some bacon down on a sheet tray. From there, we're gonna move it to our Weber Searwood XL, smoke it for about 225, and just basically incorporate as much smoke flavor as possible. Plus, once that bacon grease kind of drips down the sheet tray, it's also collecting a little bit of smoke flavor as well. We're gonna smoke them in con pellets. You guys know I've been rocking those lately. I absolutely love them. And then we'll be able to pull the bacon off and get that chopped up and start the process of our baked potato soup. Two and a half hours later, whoo, looking good. So from there, we're just gonna set this in the refrigerator, let that smoke calm down a little bit, and then we'll be able to move on. We got the cheese done and we got the bacon done. We got these massive potatoes. So this is the idea. I like a little skin on mine. If you want to go completely skinless, you can. If you want to leave all the skin on, you can. It's your soup, up to you. So I just like to roughly come in here That's good to me. Simply enough, we're going to take the potatoes and dice them into bite-sized pieces. You can imagine you just want a few pieces of potatoes scattered on your spoon. The larger potatoes will be extremely hard to eat. So just keep that in mind. We call match the hatch. Something like that should work just fine. Into a thing of water it goes. So a lot of that starch could come off while we're prepping the rest of the potatoes. All right, we ended up using about three and a half of those potatoes. Those potatoes were massive. So you can imagine if you have smaller potatoes. So we're looking at about three and a half pounds of potato. Just to give you an idea. We have chicken broth, bone broth, whatever you decide to use, that's up to you. We're using 32 ounces. We're going to boil the potatoes in this. I've already drained them with water and we're just going to add that right to the pot. All right, the potatoes are tender. Roughly about 20 minutes later, that's going to vary greatly on the amount of potatoes you put in there and the liquid. Oh, there's a bee. Temperature. You see it? Yeah, it's hungry. I'm going to take some out because we're going to use this as the thickening agent. So I'm going to take out roughly about a potato's worth. So it's probably good, maybe a little bit more. And that's going to help with our thickness. So to that, I'm going to set this to the side. We're going to add that smoked bacon, get that crispy, get that fat rendered out and see how much fat we have to see if we need to add any more to it. Just like that, you got your mashed potato. You don't have to smoke your bacon. This is a recipe that we thought, how can we incorporate the smokers? You could definitely just take the bacon and skip that step. But the addition of smoking the cheese and the addition of smoking the bacon adds so much depth of flavor that I feel like it's worth it. So if you're having a pretty day, you got things out there, go ahead and put it on because it's definitely worth it. The drawback is you lose some of the fat when you smoke it. So what we're doing now is rendering down and then we can gauge how much fat we'll need, which looks like we'll be pretty dang close. We've got a quarter cup of flour. So we're looking at roughly about a quarter cup of grease, oil, butter, whatever you have. To the bacon grease, we're going to add the jalapeno and the onion. The vegetables have been sweated down. Right before we add the flour, we're going to add that garlic. We do this so the garlic doesn't burn. You're only looking for about 60 seconds right here, just until you start smelling it and it gets fragrant. Quarter cup of flour and work this all together. This seems a little dry to me, which is what I was mentioning earlier about you got to find your good fat to flour ratio. You can add your ghee. You can add your tallow. Again, more bacon grease. But if we're talking about a baked potato soup, butter on a baked potato goes well, so why not? And I think that's perfect. Now you can see the paste that it's starting to make. Your little brown bits on the bottom, looking good. Next step, add the pot of potatoes back on there with all that chicken stock in there. Give that a stir. As it comes up to boil, it will start to thicken. Smelling good. From there, we're going to add the potatoes. If you notice, we have not added any salt and pepper yet. There's no reason to until you get all the ingredients incorporated because you're just going to keep adding and subtracting. So get that put in there. Let's turn that temp down a little bit. Get the consistency we need. And we're going to adjust our seasonings right at the end. Two cups of heavy cream. Smell that. It's that little extra oomph. A little extra oomph. So we're going to grate that block of cheddar. Reserve some for your garnish. This is eight ounces. From here, if you want to thin it out with water, with more stock, if you want it thicker, that's all up to you. Kind of like where we're at right here. As it cools, it will naturally thicken as well. Now we got the consistency we're looking for, and now we can season. Taste as you go, but I definitely think we can start eyeballing here. Salt, one teaspoon salt, half teaspoon black pepper, eighth of a teaspoon of red pepper, cayenne pepper, crushed red pepper, quarter teaspoon of paprika. Just helps with the color as well. Quarter teaspoon of dried parsley. Give that a mix. And you're just going to season to taste. If you like it saltier, you know what to do. One more teaspoon of salt. One more half teaspoon of black pepper. Half teaspoon of salt. Now that we got our seasonings, we're just going to go and cut it off. And the very last step, we're going to add about a quarter cup of sour cream, just like in your baked potatoes, however you like it. Adds a little richness, a little thickness. Baked potato soup with a little smoke flavor action on the bacon and cheese to make that flavor pop. Now what I'm doing is kind of like the idea of what we do with wine. We pour one glass, give the one glass away, and the rest of the bottle is yours. So I'm making my weiss, and then that bowl is mine tonight. Little dollop of sour cream. Hit that with just a little bit of cheese around it. Come back in with some bacon. You got to know what you're eating. Top it off with a little green onion. That way you can get your vegetables in for the day. A loaded baked potato soup. Obviously a personal option. Add a little hot sauce to mine. I don't know why I never put a hot sauce on my baked potato, but I would put it on baked potato soup. Kind of cool down a little bit at least. Well, that's a wild ride. The first thing you get, maybe I'm wrong, you've had a bite before me. The smokiness, the subtle smokiness from the cheese. I know you guys are like, well, you should smoke the cheese and let it sit for two weeks. The power of that smoke for just a few hours. You got to remember, it's like it's being dissolved throughout the whole soup. So you need a little oomph in it. The crispiness of the bacon as a topping adds that crunch that you need. You can serve it with sourdough bread, crackers, however you want to do it. But honestly, this is perfect fall food. Yep, give me a bite. Even though I've already had a bunch of bites. It does taste like baked potato in a bowl. The smokiness. It's the smokiness. It just adds, it just takes your regular potato soup and takes it up a notch. Golly. Thanks for watching. Don't forget to press that subscribe button. Pound the notification button, share with your friends. Peace. You did good, kid. Give me a bite. With the hot sauce? Yeah, I can take the hot sauce. Uh-oh. Black pepper no more. You like it with the hot sauce? Mm-hmm. Golly, that's good.