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Video guide to rustic vegetable soup
Make rustic vegetable soup the easy way
What I’m going to cook for you now is a very simple vegetable soup. There’s no real recipe I think, just vegetables, water and stock pot. So what I’ve taken is cauliflower, courgettes, carrots, leeks, bit of onion. One of my favourite vegetables, which I bought down the supermarket this morning which is great for soup, celeriac, which tastes like celery, and some Savoy cabbage. And all it’s going to be is rough and chunky, in the pan in stages and you’ll see it’s very simple. It’ll take 25 minutes to cook it.
How to begin making rustic vegetable soup
Generous amount of olive oil, some carrots, as you can see they’re not too large, not too small, once cooking 15 minutes inside the stock they’ve released all their goodness, all their flavour. So there’s the carrots. Celeriac, nice and chunky. With the celeriac, what you do is you top and tail it, cut off the outside skin, cut it into cubes. Carrots, celeriac, onions, in there. There’s many times when you’ve got one carrot, one courgette, half a cabbage left, an onion, just throw it in a pan, make some delicious soup. By frying the vegetables, what we do is we remove the water content. By removing the water content we intensify the flavour again. Again, this is a soup you can freeze, it’s fine. You know, you can’t make one portion of it. Make 6 to 8 portions, freeze half, eat half. Now we add the cauliflower and the cabbage, a little bit more olive oil and the leeks and the courgettes. You see just sweating down without any colour. As you can see the leeks are starting to wilt. The carrots are cooking. So what we’re doing is bringing out the natural flavour. So now the vegetables have been cooking for about 15 minutes, just slowly.
How to add water and vegetable stock to your soup
Then we add some water. I’ve added approximately a litre. Vegetable stock pot, I would think we’d put about 3 in here. I may put a little bit more water. What I’m going to wait for is to see how much water is released out for the vegetables before I commit. So at this moment in time, I’ve put in 1 litre of water and 3 stock pots, vegetable. I’d say, let’s put another half a litre and another stock pot. So that makes one and a half litres of water and 4 vegetable stock pots at this moment in time. You must always taste, very important, because by tasting you know what’s happening. Bring to the boil and cook for 15 minutes. Okay, so now this has been cooking with the water and the stock pot so it’s time to finish this dish.
The perfect seasoning for rustic vegetable soup
These are the celery leaves which I took off the celery, put those on. Pick some fresh basil leaves; I’m a big fan of basil leaves so I like lots of basil. Some parsley leaves, just chop it rough because let’s not forget it is quite a rustic soup, in with your parsley leaves, just chop it rough. Little sprig of thyme, in we go. May seem like a lot of herbs but there’s a lot of soup. Finish off with a bit of olive oil, it just gives it that Mediterranean, it’s like minestrone, and just a tiny bit of garlic in at the end. And there is our Knorr stock pot vegetable soup. I don’t think any fresh stock on the supermarket can deliver what the stock pot delivers. Delicious, even though I say so myself.