Broccoli and Stilton Soup
The stilton goes in off the heat, and there is less of it than you think. Blue cheese is strong and salty and a soup that tastes only of it has lost the broccoli entirely.
- Prep
- 15 min
- Cook
- 25 min
- Total
- 40 min
- Serves
- 4
- Revisions
- 1
Allergens
- Celery
- Milk
- Sulphites
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Serves
Soup
To finish
Method
Soup
Melt the butter and cook the onion and celery gently for 8 minutes without colouring.
Add the potato and stock and simmer for 10 minutes.
Use the broccoli stalk as well as the florets. Peel the tough outer layer off and chop the rest — it is sweeter than the florets and throwing it away discards a third of the vegetable.
Add the broccoli and the salt and simmer for just 5 minutes, until the stalks are tender.
Five minutes and no more. Broccoli boiled hard goes from bright green to olive drab, and the soup's colour is most of its appeal.
Blend immediately until smooth.
To finish
Return to the pan over low heat and add the Stilton a handful at a time, stirring until it melts.
Do not let it boil after the cheese goes in. Blue cheese splits readily and a boiled soup goes grainy with fat on the surface.
Stir in the cream and the pepper, and taste before adding any salt. Stilton is very salty and the soup often needs none at all.
Serve with a little extra crumbled Stilton on top.
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What to expect
- Taste
Salty and savoury first from the Stilton, then the sweet green flavour of broccoli underneath. The balance is the whole difficulty: too much cheese and the broccoli disappears.
- Aroma
Blue cheese, mostly, with the broccoli behind it.
- Texture
Smooth and velvety, thickened by the potato rather than by flour.
- Sound
None.
- How the flavour moves
Salt and blue cheese first, then a green sweetness, then a long savoury finish. Black pepper at the end lifts it.
- Serve it
Hot but not boiling, and it should be served in a warmed bowl.
- Goes with
Crusty bread or a cheese scone. A glass of something white and sharp.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Beginner, with two things to not overdo.
- Cost
Low.
- Equipment
A heavy pan and a blender.
- When to make it
Winter lunch, and the week after Christmas.
- Best season
British broccoli runs roughly July to November; the soup suits winter regardless.
- You know it is done when
The stalks tender to a knife and the florets still bright green. The finished soup should be a clear green, not olive.
- And it feels like
Smooth, with the cheese fully melted and no grain.
- Food safety
Nothing unusual. Take care blending hot liquid — no more than two-thirds full and a cloth over the lid.
- Where it goes wrong
- Boiling the broccoli for fifteen minutes, which kills the colour.
- Discarding the stalk, which is a third of the vegetable and the sweeter part.
- Too much Stilton, which drowns everything.
- Adding the cheese with the pan still on the heat, which makes it grainy.
- Salting before tasting — Stilton brings a great deal.
- If it does go wrong
Khaki: it was overcooked, and the colour will not come back. Grainy: it boiled after the cheese went in. Overwhelmingly cheesy: more stock and another handful of blanched broccoli. Thin: another boiled potato, blended in.
- Making it ahead
Make the base ahead and add the cheese on reheating, which also protects the colour.
- Keeping it
Three days in the fridge.
- Reheating
Gently, without boiling, or the cheese will split on the second heating even though it survived the first.
- Freezing
Freezes for two months, though the colour dulls and the cheese can go slightly grainy. Better frozen before the cheese goes in.
- Leftovers
As a sauce for pasta, thinned with a little cream.
- Scaling it
Doubles cleanly.
- Substitutions
Any blue cheese; Stilton is milder than Roquefort, which would need reducing to about 90g. A mature Cheddar makes a different and perfectly good soup.
- Dietary swaps
Contains milk, plus celery and sulphites from shop stock. Stilton is made with animal rennet, so it is not vegetarian — this is a very common misconception about the soup and worth stating plainly. A vegetarian blue cheese exists and is the straightforward substitute. Gluten free, egg free and nut free.
- Shopping for it
Any Stilton. It does not need to be a good piece — this is the recipe for the dry end of one.
- Keeping the cost down
The end of a Stilton, which is what this soup exists for. Broccoli stalks are free flavour.
- Sustainability
Mostly vegetables, and the cheese is the footprint — roughly ten litres of milk per kilogram, though only 120g is used here. Its real virtue is waste: it is the standard British answer to the last piece of a Christmas Stilton, and using the broccoli stalk rather than binning it recovers about a third of the vegetable. Broccoli grows well in Britain from summer to late autumn.
- Nutrition
A lot of vegetable, with the fat and salt coming from the cheese and cream.
- Worth it?
Five minutes, and less cheese than you think. Both feel wrong and both are right.
Where it comes from
- Origin
Britain, late twentieth century.
- Also called
None.
- Said out loud
Straightforward.
- What the name means
Descriptive.
- History
This is a modern soup and it is more honest to say so than to construct a heritage. Stilton, by contrast, is old and legally protected: it has had a Protected Designation of Origin since 1996 and may only be made in Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire — famously not in the village of Stilton itself, which is in Cambridgeshire and where the cheese was sold to travellers rather than made. Broccoli in the form we eat it, calabrese, became widely available in Britain only in the later twentieth century, which is why the soup cannot be older than it is.
- Why it matters
A pub-menu and supermarket-carton staple, and one of the small number of blue-cheese dishes that people who dislike blue cheese will eat.
- When it is eaten
Lunch, cold weather, and using up the end of a Christmas Stilton, which is what a great deal of it is made from.
- The traditional way
None beyond blending.
- How it changed
It has not been around long enough to change.
- Regional variations
None.
- How this version differs
Five minutes on the broccoli rather than fifteen, the stalk used rather than binned, and considerably less cheese than most recipes call for.
- Sources and credit
None.
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British
Soups
Cheese
Leafy greens
Vegetarian