Carrot Soup with Ginger and Lemon – Easy Vegetarian Recipe

This tasty, simple carrot soup is a perfect vegetarian dish. All it takes is carrots, a few spices and a bit of enthusiasm, just like carrot patties. It needs very little hands-on time. Carrots are a remarkable vegetable – there is hardly a home without them. Just boil the roots, puree them and season with spices, and your soup is ready.

Carrot soup puree is a well-known dish in French cooking. It is always thick and fragrant, but there are many recipes for it. Its common name, Potage Crécy, commemorates the battle fought by King Edward III's army at Crécy in 1346 – or, according to another version, honours Crécy-en-Ponthieu, a commune in France said to grow the best carrots. The main ingredient is juicy sweet carrots, to which stock is added, often with crème fraîche or cream. Other vegetables are frequently included as well. Interestingly, the soup is served both hot and cold.

Carrot soup also has a “medicinal” relative – Moro soup. It was proposed in 1908 by the German paediatrician Ernst Moro as a home remedy for digestive upsets in children. The recipe is very plain: 500 g of peeled carrots are simmered in a litre of water for about an hour and a half, pureed, topped up with boiled water to one litre and seasoned with 3 g of salt. The long cooking is essential, while spices, lemon and ginger have no place here. This is therapeutic food rather than a dish for lunch, and it should only be given to a child on a doctor's advice.

At home you don't have to stick strictly to the rules – it isn't always possible, and you want some variety anyway. We make the soup thick, almost like a carrot puree, and season it with lemon and spices. While the carrots are boiling, we add lemon zest to the stock. When we can, we also add ingredients typical of Southeast Asian cuisines – peeled ginger, galangal, lemongrass and so on.

For this carrot soup puree we cook a vegetable stock, though chicken stock works fine too. The amount of vegetable mash should give you a soup as thick as you like it. To my taste, it should be thick. So once the carrots are cooked and pureed, I thin the puree with stock, adding it little by little until I'm happy with the consistency.

If you can, use young carrots – they give the soup a very delicate, sweet flavour. Avoid coarse, low-grade roots or ones with green patches: they can taste bitter, with a distinct “leafy” note.

Some recipes roast the roots first and only then make the stock. That makes pureeing tricky – the flesh turns dense and firm, though tasty. Boiled carrots are much easier to puree: just rub them through a sieve or blitz them with a blender. We also deliberately add no vegetable oil or animal fat to the soup. Occasionally, though rarely, we use coconut milk or cream.