Vegetable Cream Soup
Contrary to popular belief, soups, although they’re considered liquid dishes, aren’t always completely liquid. Soup consistency ranges from a thin broth to a thick puréed soup. I’ll admit I’ve never liked thin soups, broths and stocks. In my opinion, a soup should be something you can eat with a spoon without fear of spilling it. In that respect, puréed vegetable soup is practically the ideal.
Usually vegetable soup is a fairly thin dish, served as a first course (that’s why it’s called the first course), and it’s half liquid by volume. Everything else is vegetables. I don’t argue, it’s healthy and tasty. But as a kid I would usually pick out the vegetables with my spoon and barely touch the broth. That’s just how it was. Puréed vegetable soup is an excellent alternative, especially if you want to eat all of your vegetable soup.
You can also make a vegetable soup with a purée in it. The difference is that in that case the boiled vegetables aren’t puréed but mixed into a vegetable purée. Puréed vegetable soup, on the other hand, is a purée of all the vegetables, finely blended, with no large pieces.
Puréed vegetable soup isn’t only full of vitamins and minerals. On top of that, it’s extremely low in calories (a plate has about as many as a piece of bread), yet it’s very good at satisfying hunger and filling you up. Dietitians recommend vegetable soups, and puréed soups are especially good for gastrointestinal conditions.
People most often ask how many calories are in puréed vegetable soup. If I counted correctly, the soup in this recipe has no more than 350 kcal for the whole batch.
To make puréed vegetable soup you don’t need to buy complicated or exotic vegetables. Besides the usual ones, broccoli, green peas and cauliflower also work well. You can mix several kinds of vegetables.
To make puréed vegetable soup you need a blender or a food processor. Not so long ago, though, vegetables were pushed through a sieve to make a purée.
This puréed vegetable soup is not complicated. It cooks quickly and can include other vegetables you have on hand.
Ingredients
2 servings
Step-by-step recipe
For the purée, prepare a young zucchini of medium size. It should be young, smooth, undamaged, with seeds that haven’t formed yet. Peel the zucchini and cut it into pieces. Put them in a pot, add a peeled garlic clove, and pour in water just to the level of the zucchini. Put it on the heat. Cook for 10-12 minutes after it comes to a boil.
For some reason most people call green beans “asparagus”. Strictly speaking, in the culinary sense asparagus is the tips of young shoots of a plant of the asparagus family, which grows around the world in dry climates. What we call asparagus beans are green beans, the unripe pods of the common bean, picked green before the beans inside start to ripen. Most often they’re frozen for the winter. Green beans are great for puréed vegetable soup. Still, they’re easy to replace with other suitable green vegetables, such as green peas, broccoli and so on.
Peel the young carrot and cut it into cubes, not too small. Peel the potatoes, preferably young ones, and cut them into cubes like the carrot. Wash the green beans, trim the ends and try to remove the tough string where the two halves of the pod join. It comes off like a wire; the main thing is to get hold of it. Cut the long pods with a sharp knife into pieces 3-4 cm long, preferably on the diagonal.
Put the chopped carrot, potato and green beans in a small pot. Pour in cold water just to the level of the vegetables. Leave the pot on the heat and cook for 15 minutes after it comes to a boil. The vegetables should be cooked through. By the way, don’t let it boil hard; puréed vegetable soup, like all soups, is usually cooked at a gentle simmer, so the vegetables don’t fall apart.
Drain all the liquid from the cooked vegetables into a separate container.
Drain the liquid from the cooked zucchini too. Transfer the zucchini to a blender. Make sure the boiled garlic clove goes in with it; it gives the soup a special flavor, barely noticeable but pleasant. Blend the zucchini until completely smooth.
Pour the zucchini purée over the cooked vegetables: carrot, potato and green beans. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Add 0.5 tsp sugar (2 g). If you like, you can add other favorite spices to the soup, such as nutmeg. But just a little!
If you like, you can adjust the thickness of the soup by adding some of the liquid left from cooking the vegetables.
Stir the soup gently and put it on the heat. As soon as bubbles start to appear, reduce the heat to the minimum and cook the soup, stirring constantly, for 4-5 minutes, no longer.
The puréed vegetable soup is ready. All that’s left is to ladle it into bowls and serve.
You can of course sprinkle the soup with chopped dill and parsley, but these fragrant herbs have a strong flavor of their own. I think that’s unnecessary. A piece of fresh white bread, though, will be just right.
Calories and macros
130 kcal
Serving ≈ 380 g
- Protein5 g16% of kcal
- Fat1 g5% of kcal
- Carbs23 g79% of kcal
100 g35 kcalProtein 1.3 gFat 0.2 gCarbs 6.2 g
Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.
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