Recipe Vegan Cream of Broccoli Soup

[SatNavSaysStraightOn]

I've recently purchased a Vitamix to replace a similar but cheaper high powered liquidiser/blender and this was the first recipe I tried because it was what was in the fridge!

Ingredients
1 onion, chopped
1 tbsp olive oil
1-2 heads of broccoli, chopped (including the stalk and stems)
750 ml water (including the water from steaming the broccoli, see below)
3 tsp vegetable stock (or add needed for the water above)
1 handful of unsalted (ideally unroasted) cashew nuts
Seasoning, as needed

Method

1. Lightly fry the onions in the oil.
2. Meanwhile lightly steam/boil the broccoli florets, stem and stalk. Reserve the water from cooking to add to your stock making up.
3. Allow onions, drained broccoli and reserved water to cool.
4. If the reserved water doesn't make up 750ml, add water as needed.
5. Add the ingredients to the Vitamix in the following order, water/veg stock, onions, cashew nuts and finally the broccoli.
6. Blend thoroughly until smooth.

My Vitamix has a hot soup setting so I used that as a combined blend and reheat.

If you don't have a blender capable of blending raw cashew nuts, then you have 2 options.

1. Soak the cashew nuts overnight until thoroughly soft and blend/liquidise using your normal blender. This may or may not thoroughly cream them unless you change the order of things. My old Omniblend needed to blend the cashew nuts into a cream using as little amount of liquid as possible before I could add them to the soup.
2. Switch out the cashew nuts for something like soya cream instead, or switch some of the water out with a non-dairy milk.

 

[The Late Night Gourmet]

Very interesting! I've gotten in the habit of skipping milk products and thickeners (like cornstarch) in most soups, since I just up the vegetable-to-stock ratio to get a thicker soup. Doing things that way doesn't replace the cream aspect, but I think your way might. My first move would be to blast the cashews in my "spice grinder" (really a coffee bean grinder that I never use for coffee anymore). This pretty reliably reduces things like this to dust for easy integration. Next soup, I'll give it a try!

 

[swasthika]

Very interesting! I've gotten in the habit of skipping milk products and thickeners (like cornstarch) in most soups, since I just up the vegetable-to-stock ratio to get a thicker soup. Doing things that way doesn't replace the cream aspect, but I think your way might. My first move would be to blast the cashews in my "spice grinder" (really a coffee bean grinder that I never use for coffee anymore). This pretty reliably reduces things like this to dust for easy integration. Next soup, I'll give it a try!

I am happy to see the persons with same taste like me as you have told "habit of skipping milk products and thickeners ". Your idea will be useful for those who are skipping like us.