Vegetable Soup

Full of healthy white beans and fresh veggies, Vegetable Soup is a hearty and filling soup. If you want to add a lot of flavor, try my best tips!

Please don’t think I’m being dramatic when I say that I will take the first pricey flight to Key West the moment I see another snowstorm. I should be landing in south Florida in about 36 hours, if the forecast is accurate.

under other words, we are currently covered under several feet of snow, as is the case in many other regions of the nation. As a means of subsistence, I’ve taken to cooking up a storm of soups and stews. My most recent dish is a hearty vegetable soup that is rich with white beans and a bounty of fresh vegetables.

A large bowl will provide the same comforting warmth as sunshine on a chilly, windy day—well, maybe not quite as much as the Gulf of Mexico, but it will do!

Simplified Vegetable Soup

The phrase “feel good food” perfectly describes my homemade vegetable soup recipe. With more than seven different kinds of veggies and substantial white beans, it’s ideal for a weeknight meal or for making lunches on the go.

Even though it freezes and reheats beautifully, this dish easily feeds a small army. However, you can easily reduce the soup recipe in half if you’re preparing it for a smaller group.

Things Required

This nutritious vegetable soup does require some chopping, so grab a cutting board and knife. Just relax, put on some music, and get to work!

Program vegetables include kale, roasted red peppers, potatoes, celery, onion or shallot, carrots, sweet corn, and roasted red peppers. Never fear kale if you’re afraid to use it! It gives every bite a fantastic, substantial mouthfeel. Instead of kale, you can use chopped baby spinach; however, kale is nicer when reheated.
The soup gets its taste from dried herbs and seasonings, such as black pepper, dried bay leaves, Italian seasoning, and homemade seasoned salt.
If you’d like to make this soup vegetarian, you can use vegetable broth or stock instead of chicken stock, although I personally think the flavor is much better with chicken.
Great Northern beans, a type of white bean, are incredibly rich and creamy. If you prefer larger beans, such as Cannellini beans, or even better, chickpeas, feel free to sub them in!
The vegetables will be sautéed in extra virgin olive oil.

Enhancements: To elevate the flavor of this soup, try adding a rind of parmesan cheese and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice right before serving. I will get to that in a bit.

Tips for Storing and Reheating

There will be a LOT of gluten-free soup from this recipe, but don’t worry—it freezes and reheats well. Once the soup has cooled to room temperature, transfer it to a sealed container and refrigerate.

You can reheat the soup in the microwave in small bowls for individual servings or heat it thoroughly in a soup pot over medium heat.

Put the soup in gallon-sized freezer bags, seal, and freeze flat. Alternatively, put it in Souper Cubes and freeze for up to three months. Just make sure to let it cool completely before freezing. Before reheating, let it thaw in the fridge.

Vegetable Soup Recipes with Lots of Flavor

Searches for “vegetable soup” on Google get the following results:

“How can this vegetable soup be improved in flavor?”

“How does vegetable soup get such a rich flavor?”

“What the hey, my veggie soup tastes like nothing at all?”

The flavor of vegetable soup is often criticized, so I suggest that you and I learn from Samin Nosrat’s book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. There are four main components that, according to her book, decide how delicious your food will be:

Salt: makes food taste better.
Fat enhances the taste.
Acidity: a balancing and brightening characteristic.
The texture of food is influenced by heat.

My mental image of vegetable soup is a flavorless, flat-tasting, and very thin soup that has no fat whatsoever. In this recipe for vegetable soup, we address that:

Soup gets a salty, umami boost when a rind of parmesan cheese is added to it as it simmers. This is a DREAMY simple method for enhancing the flavor of soup. The rinds of parmesan cheese can be found near the cheese section of most supermarkets. Just omit this if you’re going for a vegan soup.

Just before serving, add some fresh lemon juice into the soup to perk up the broth. Instead of a lemony flavor, the soup will be vivacious and enlivened.
An extra special touch is to garnish each bowl with fresh herbs and the healthy fat from a dollop of homemade pesto just before serving. Vegan pesto, like the one I make or Gotham Greens’, is one of my favorite things.

Instead of vegetable stock, try chicken stock if you’re not following a vegan or vegetarian diet. Vegetable stock is too thin and sugary for my taste, which is a strange decision. When I want more flavor in my chicken broth, I choose chicken stock instead.

Vegetable Soup Appetizers

My Gluten-Free Focaccia is the perfect accompaniment to a steaming bowl of vegetable soup, and I never pass up a chance to subtly nudge you in that direction.

You only need half a teaspoon to a teaspoon of the prepared pesto that we described before, and we also enjoy to top each bowl with a sprinkle of freshly grated parmesan cheese.

This is absolutely mouth-watering; I say we delve into a bowl of it immediately.

Soup Recipe: Vegetable

The first step is to sauté the veggies.
Put extra virgin olive oil into a big Dutch oven or soup pot and heat it over medium heat. Then, throw in some celery, thinly sliced carrots, and a chopped shallot or onion. Sauté the vegetables for 10 to 12 minutes, or until they are soft, seasoning with homemade seasoned salt and pepper.

Sauté the minced garlic for one or two minutes, or until it releases its strong aroma.

Step 2: Increase the amount of vegetables, spices, and broth

Toss in a jar of chopped roasted red peppers, Great Northern beans, frozen sweet corn, diced gold potatoes, dried bay leaves, Italian spice, and the rind of a Parmesan cheese. Bring to a boil.

Toss in a large amount of stock, either chicken or vegetable, and then bring the soup to a simmer over high heat.

Cook the soup over low heat, in Step 3.

Reduce heat to low and simmer, stirring periodically, for 15 to 20 minutes, or until potatoes are cooked. Sauté the lacinato kale until it becomes tender, about 5 minutes after adding the sliced kale.

At the supermarket store, you may find lacinato kale, also called “dinosaur kale,” next to regular curly kale. Substitute a small bunch of chopped curly kale for the lacinato if you can’t locate any.

A squeeze of lemon juice is the fourth step

Squeeze some fresh lemon juice into the saucepan as the last step. You don’t want the soup to taste lemony, but rather brightened and enhanced in flavor, so don’t add too much. For the entire enormous pot, I put half a teaspoon to a teaspoon. More can always be added!

After ladling the soup into individual bowls, garnish with a handful of fresh pesto and/or a generous sprinkling of parmesan cheese. Stunning to look at and extremely enjoyable to eat.

Savor every last mouthwatering sip!