BROCCOLI CHEDDAR SOUP

It wasn’t too long ago that I stumbled across a video of Gordon Ramsay’s method to making a simple and clean broccoli soup. I was impressed with the simplicity of it, as I had been looking around at other recipes that called for a multitude of ingredients to put the soup together. Armed with a bag of broccoli florets from the supermarket, I set out to make my own rendition of broccoli cheddar soup using the cooking techniques from the video.

Broccoli Cheddar Soup
Makes 2 – 3 servings

~ Broccoli florets (10 oz. bag)
~ Cheddar cheese
~ Salt
~ Pepper
~ Sriracha sauce (optional)

This recipe I kind of did by making adjustments on the fly and didn’t go in with a preset amount of everything. I’ll try to estimate as much as I can, but most of it would be to add a little bit of specific things as it suits to your taste. For the process of making the broccoli soup, I’d recommend watching that video that I linked to up there, since it helped me through the cooking process. But I’ll still lay out the general concepts below.

Take out a pot and get started boiling up some water to cook your broccoli in. Add some salt into the boiling water before putting in your broccoli. Once all of it is inside, add some more salt over top of everything before covering it again to bring the pot back up to boiling. Cook the broccoli for roughly three to four minutes. This should be enough to soften the broccoli that when you run a knife through a piece in the pot, it should cut through very easily.

At this point, take out a blender, since that is what we’ll be using to finish off the soup. Scoop out the broccoli from the water into a separate bowl (or directly into the blender). Be sure to keep the “broccoli stock” that is leftover in the pot from cooking the broccoli. That’s the other core component that we’ll be using to blend together the final product.

Add the broccoli stock to about halfway up your stack of broccoli inside the blender. Put the lid over it, pulse the blender just a bit before turning on the full blend on low for a few seconds. Once it looks like it has liquefied, turn the blender off and open the lid to taste the soup. This is where you’ll be making the most adjustments to finalize the taste of the soup.

Go ahead and add in your cheddar cheese at this point. I think that I started with about 1/4 cup, but gradually increased it to 1/2 cup, if not more. Blend it back up, and give it another try. You’ll probably be repeating this process as you add in the salt and pepper also. If you’re like me and you like a bit of heat in your dishes, consider adding in 1/4 – 1/2 tsp of Sriracha sauce. You still get the full broccoli cheddar taste, but will definitely get some heat from the soup as you eat more.

This is a great soup that is very simple to make with some extra broccoli that you might have lying around. The consistency is a great balance between thick and thin and the flavors all compliment each other very well.

Categories: Recipes

Tagged as: broccoli, cheddar cheese, recipes, soup