You've got to love an OG mushroom soup. Sipping a warm mugful on a rainy day, where the sky matches the colour of the soup, doesn’t get more (deliciously) comforting.
It’s super easy to make mushroom soup yourself – you only need a few simple ingredients to make something really stellar! Here I’ve shared two versions; one’s a vegan-friendly option that uses a nut-base cashew cream, while the other uses traditional fresh dairy cream.
Cashew what-now?
Cashew cream is where you soak cashews with water, and then blend until smooth to produce a cream-like sauce.
It’s a popular condiment in plant-based or vegan cuisine; often used to replace dairy cream, whether that be sweetened in desserts or as a savoury dollop on top of nachos.
As a cream replacement in soup it helps add that nice richness and depth that dairy cream supplies, as well as extra protein and creamy fat.
Nutritional Spotlight: Mushrooms
Mushrooms are a wonderfully versatile ingredient in the kitchen, and super nutritious. They’re a great source of five of the eight B-vitamins, which are important for helping our body convert food into energy. They’re also water-soluble, meaning they’re not stored in our body and so it’s important to consume sources daily.
Mushrooms are also the richest source of selenium in the produce department, an important antioxidant that helps our body fight damaging free-radicals in the body – around 1 cup of mushrooms will provide ⅓ of our daily selenium needs!
Cream of Mushroom Soup
Rating:
Ingredients:
- 1 brown onion
- 3 garlic cloves
- 650 g white buttom mushrooms
- 1 Tbsp oil
- 1.25 L vegetable stock
- 3-4 small sprigs of thyme or rosemary*
- Salt and pepper, to taste
Cream options
- ½ cup raw cashews + 1 cup of water (vegan-friendly) OR
- ½ cup dairy pouring cream
Method:
- If you're preparing the vegan friendly version, place cashews into a bowl and pour over cold water until the cashews are covered. Leave to soak for 30 minutes.
- Peel and slice onion into half moons. Peel and roughly chop garlic.
- Wash mushrooms. Slice.
- Heat oil in a soup pot over a medium-low heat. Saute onions and garlic for five minutes, or until the onions are soft and clear.
- Add mushrooms and saute for another five minutes – the mushrooms should have shrunken in size.
- Pour in the vegetable stock. Add a little extra water if needed to cover the mushrooms. Add your sprigs of thyme. Mix altogether.
- Bring the soup to a boil and then reduce to a simmer for 15 minutes.
- Turn the heat off and let the soup cool. Blend in batches in a food processor, or blend using a stick blender – blend, blend, blend until the soup is perfectly smooth! Return soup back to the soup pot. Season with a few twists of both the salt and pepper shaker.
- If making the vegan-friendly version, blend cashews with water until you've created a super smooth cashew cream. Pour into the soup and mix well – you can reserve a little cream if you'd like for a garnish. Otherwise if making the non-vegan friendly, then pour cream into soup and mix well. Taste test and adjust seasoning if needed.
Notes:
* Or sub for a sprinkle of dried herbs
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2 Comments
Can you use cashew milk in this recipe?
Hey Chelsea! The nut blended with water will thicken the soup – with cashew milk the nut fibre/pulp is strained out. But in saying that – it’d still be totally delish if you just added cashew milk xx