Carrot and Coriander Soup
Ground coriander seed toasted in the butter, and fresh coriander leaf stirred in at the end. The two taste nothing alike and the soup needs both.
- Prep
- 15 min
- Cook
- 30 min
- Total
- 45 min
- Serves
- 4
- Revisions
- 1
Allergens
- Celery
- 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
Toast the coriander seeds in a dry pan for a minute until they smell citrusy, then grind them.
Ground coriander seed and fresh coriander leaf are two entirely different flavours — the seed is warm, citrusy and slightly floral, and the leaf is green and pungent. Recipes that use only one of them produce a soup that tastes half-finished, and this is the most common fault in it.
Heat the oil and cook the onion for 8 minutes until soft and translucent.
Add the garlic, the ground coriander and the cumin and stir for 90 seconds, until the spices smell toasted rather than dusty.
Add the carrots, potato, stock and salt, bring to a simmer and cook for 20 minutes, until the carrots are completely tender.
The potato is not filler. Carrots alone blend to a thin, slightly grainy soup; a single potato gives it body without tasting of anything.
Blend until completely smooth, adding a little more stock if it is too thick.
To finish
Stir in most of the chopped fresh coriander — stalks included, which have more flavour than the leaves — and the lemon juice.
Taste for salt and serve with the rest of the coriander scattered on top.
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What to expect
- Taste
Sweet from the carrot, warm and citrusy from the seed, green and pungent from the leaf, with lemon lifting it at the end. The sweetness is considerable and the acid is what stops it being cloying.
- Aroma
Toasted coriander seed first — a distinctly citrus, almost orange-peel smell that surprises people who only know the leaf.
- Texture
Velvety. Any graininess means the carrots were not soft enough before blending.
- Sound
None.
- How the flavour moves
Sweetness first, then the warm spice, then a green herbal finish and a lemon lift.
- Serve it
Hot. It is also good chilled in summer, thinned slightly.
- Goes with
Bread and butter. Nothing else needed.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Beginner.
- Cost
Very low. Carrots are the cheapest vegetable there is.
- Equipment
A heavy pan and a blender.
- When to make it
Any time. It is cheap, fast and freezes.
- Best season
Carrots are available and cheap all year and are at their sweetest through autumn and winter.
- You know it is done when
The carrots should be completely soft, giving no resistance to a knife. A carrot soup blended before the carrots are fully tender is grainy and stays that way.
- And it feels like
Smooth and slightly thick, coating the back of a spoon.
- Food safety
Nothing unusual. Blend hot liquid in batches no more than two-thirds full.
- Where it goes wrong
- Using only ground coriander, or only fresh, so half the flavour is missing.
- Adding the spices to liquid rather than frying them in oil, which leaves them dusty.
- No acid at the end, so it stays sweet and flat.
- Blending before the carrots are fully soft, which leaves it grainy.
- Throwing away the coriander stalks, which have more flavour than the leaves.
- If it does go wrong
Flat and sweet: lemon, then salt. Grainy: it needed longer before blending, and cannot be fully fixed. Dusty-tasting: the spices were not fried. Too thick: more stock, added a little at a time.
- Making it ahead
Better the next day and it freezes well, so it is worth doubling.
- Keeping it
Four days in the fridge.
- Reheating
Gently. It thickens as it stands and wants a splash of stock.
- Freezing
Freezes very well for three months, better than most soups because there is no dairy in it to go grainy.
- Leftovers
Thinned with coconut milk and heated with a spoonful of curry paste, it is a different soup.
- Scaling it
Doubles cleanly.
- Substitutions
Ground coriander from a jar works at 1½ tsp and is noticeably duller than freshly toasted seed. A sweet potato instead of the ordinary one makes it sweeter and thicker.
- Dietary swaps
Vegan and dairy free as written, which is unusual among the creamy-looking soups. Contains celery and sulphites only from shop-bought stock. Gluten free, egg free and nut free.
- Shopping for it
Whole coriander seeds are cheap from an international grocer and keep a year. Fresh coriander is much cheaper as a bunch than in a supermarket packet.
- Keeping the cost down
The cheapest soup here. A kilogram of carrots costs very little and this uses most of one.
- Sustainability
Almost entirely root vegetables grown in Britain, with a very low footprint and a long UK season. It is vegan as written without any substitution, which few of the comfort dishes here manage. Using the coriander stalks rather than binning them is a small saving that this recipe actually depends on for flavour, and buying the herb as a bunch rather than a packet cuts the plastic and the waste of a pot that dies in a week.
- Nutrition
Almost entirely vegetables, with olive oil for fat. One of the most straightforwardly healthy things in this collection.
- Worth it?
Two forms of one plant, and both of them. That is the recipe and almost nobody does it.
Where it comes from
- Origin
Britain, late twentieth century.
- Also called
None.
- Said out loud
Straightforward.
- What the name means
Descriptive, and slightly misleading — 'coriander' in the title refers to both the seed and the leaf, which are different flavours.
- History
This is a modern soup with a traceable commercial history rather than a folk one. Chilled fresh soup arrived in British supermarkets in the 1980s, and carrot and coriander became one of the two or three flavours that defined the category. Coriander leaf itself was not a common British ingredient until the later twentieth century, which is why the soup cannot be old.
- Why it matters
Modest, but it is one of the small number of dishes most British people would recognise from a carton before they ever made one.
- When it is eaten
Lunch, and a soup for people who do not like soup.
- The traditional way
None.
- How it changed
Nothing to change.
- Regional variations
None.
- How this version differs
The seed is toasted and ground rather than taken from a jar, and both forms of coriander are used, which is the whole argument of the recipe.
- Sources and credit
None to an individual.
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British
Soups
Vegan
Vegetarian
30 minutes