Chalk this one up to my need to find a way to eat more vegetables on a regular basis. And the need to make my wife happy, she really likes soups, and carrots. So a roasted carrot soup seemed like a pretty good idea, for both of us. And if you have a good sized pot, a Vitamix or immersion blender, this recipe should be pretty easy.
There are a ton of roasted carrot soup recipes online, but I tried to find a few that worked with my cooking style and timing. In general, I don’t like recipes that call for halves of this, or 1/4 of that, I much prefer recipes where I can buy an entire something and use it up so that I’m not left with a portion of some perishable ingredient that later gets thrown out, making me feel remorseful and guilty.
After minimal tweaking, that is exactly what I was able to do with this soup recipe, no leftover ingredient fragments, but plenty of leftover soup, which is a good thing in our house! One note on this subject, I am able to say this only because I often have coconut milk sitting in my refrigerator, I don’t need to buy a whole can for this recipe and then use only 1/2 cup of it. If you don’t want to include coconut milk, simply exclude it and you’ll be fine, but I like having it on hand for coffee, soups and stews.
This soup contains a pretty clean list of ingredients, so there isn’t much to worry about here in regards to whether or not each ingredient is healthy or not. Of course I buy organic carrots as opposed to to conventional, as I do when buying most anything grown in the ground, and the same is true of the onion. I have only high quality avocado and olive oil in the house, so that’s covered, and the same with the coconut milk. Everything else is simply herbs, spices, salt and pepper, very little to worry about in the health department.
One health question that does come up however when dealing with carrots is whether or not the roasting process make the vegetable more or less nutritious. My understanding is that you usually want to be gentle with vegetables, as high heat cooking can leach the nutrients out, but carrots are a bit different, and the roasting process will actually help break down the beta carotene for you! The same is true of tomatoes and lycopene, but that’s for a different recipe.
After roasting the carrots and breaking down the nutrients, adding a bit of fat to this recipe will make the beta carotene even more available to your body, which is music to my ears, I love dietary fat! Which is one benefit of starting with olive oil and adding coconut milk or heavy cream, the extra fat will make your roasted carrot soup even more nutritious! However, you don’t need as much fat as I have added to get your nutrition in, so feel free to drop the coconut oil or cream if you like, and use an extra tablespoon or two of olive oil instead.
One other option is to add a garnish on at the end, either in addition to, or in place of the fat in the recipe. For instance, in the picture at the top of this page, I have sprinkled just a bit of goat cheese onto my soup, which works really well! But you could just as easily drizzle some heavy cream in at the end, or creme fraiche, both of which would be wonderful.
Roasted Carrot Soup
Ingredients
- 2 lbs carrots
- 1 onion
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 6 cups chicken stock
- 1/2 cup coconut milk
- 5 sprigs thyme
- 1.5 tsp sea salt
- 3/4 tsp black pepper
- 1 tsp cumin
- 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes
Instructions
- Remove ends from carrots and cut into large pieces and start roasting in pan on stove in olive oil in a large pot.
- Chop onions and add to carrots after they have been cooking for about 15 minutes, stirring every few minutes.
- After onions have cooked 15 minutes, add the thyme, spices, coconut milk and chicken stock and bring to a low boil, then simmer for 30 minutes.
- Using either an immersion blender or a Vitamix, puree the carrot soup to the desired consistency, if the soup is too thick and chunky you can always add a bit more chicken stock and/or coconut milk.
Nutrition
A quick note, and I don’t know if this will make your happy or depress you, or maybe you don’t even care, but I did notice when putting together this nutrition panel that one bowl comes out at 200 calories, roughly. You know what other recipe on my site sits right at 200 calories? My chocolate chip cookies! Maybe equal in calories, but that’s about it!
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