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Vegetable soup

Name: Vegetable soup
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 30 min
Total time: 45 min
Yield: 4
Cuisine: Turkish
Ingredients: 2 pcs Potatoes; 2 pcs Carrots; 150 g Celeriac; 1 pcs Courgette; 1 pcs Onion; 2 pcs Tomatoes; 3 tbsp Olive oil; 1.2 litres Water; 15 g Parsley; 7 g Salt

Throwing everything in at once is easy and wrong. These vegetables differ twofold in cooking time, and knowing the order is the only skill involved.

Soups · Turkish · Budget · One pot · Freezes well · Uses leftovers · Vegan · Seasonal

45 minTime

213Kcal / serving

853Total kcal

Preparation: 15 min
Cooking: 30 min
Difficulty: Easy
Cost: Very cheap
Season: All year

Where this dish comes from

Vegetable soup is a dish without a recipe: it is made from whatever is in the house. It does have a structure, though, and the structure is an order from firm to soft — roots twenty minutes, non-root vegetables ten, leaves three. Without that order the courgette has collapsed while the carrot is still raw, and the soup gets defended as "well, it is vegetable soup".

Method

Before the heat goes on

Sort the vegetables into three groups by firmness: roots, non-roots, leaves.
Cut them all the same size, 1.5 cm dice: equal size means equal cooking.

You will need: A pan · A sharp knife

Soften the onion in the oil for five minutes, add the tomato and cook five minutes until its water has gone.

Look for It should thicken enough to leave a trail on the base of the pan.

Why Driving the tomato’s water off and then adding water gives a more concentrated base than dropping the same tomato into water: the sugars concentrate and partly caramelise.

Starch gelatinised The granules soaked up water, swelled and burst into a network. It has thickened, and it will firm further as it cools. no way back
Add the potato, carrot and celeriac with the water, and boil twenty minutes.

Look for A knife tip should meet slight resistance in the carrot; it does not need to be soft yet, there are ten minutes to go.

Why The pectin in a root vegetable’s cell walls dissolves with heat and that takes twenty minutes; put in with the courgette, one is raw while the other is purée.

Starch gelatinised The granules soaked up water, swelled and burst into a network. It has thickened, and it will firm further as it cools. no way back
Add the courgette and the salt and give it eight minutes more.

Look for The cubes should keep their edges rather than going shapeless.

Why A courgette is 95% water with thin cell walls: eight minutes softens it, twenty dissolves it. If you want to see courgette in the bowl, this is the timing.

If it went wrong

If the courgette has collapsed, no matter: blend the soup and serve it as a cream of vegetable. The same taste in a different presentation.

Starch gelatinised The granules soaked up water, swelled and burst into a network. It has thickened, and it will firm further as it cools. no way back

Salt · 0.29% Low. Everything reads flat and nothing steps forward.
Off the heat, stir in the chopped parsley, cover and wait two minutes.

Look for The parsley should stay bright green.

Why Parsley’s aroma is gone within minutes above 60 °C and its colour yellows; off the heat it keeps both its smell and its green.

Starch gelatinised The granules soaked up water, swelled and burst into a network. It has thickened, and it will firm further as it cools. no way back

Salt · 0.29% Low. Everything reads flat and nothing steps forward.

What the model could follow

This recipe was run through the engine step by step — what goes in when, and at what temperature and for how long. The reactions above come from that run.

peak 140 °C · 40 minutes · engine 1.0.0 · confidence low

Servings

4

Ingredients

2 pcs Potatoes
2 pcs Carrots
150 g Celeriac
1 pcs Courgette
1 pcs Onion
2 pcs Tomatoes
3 tbsp Olive oil
1.2 litres Water
15 g Parsley
7 g Salt

What did you think

Who is eating

Everyone A baby under one Pregnant A child An athlete

We hold no safety rule for this group that a dish could break — training, or an age, does not make food dangerous. The thresholds below are about the person rather than about the dish.

Not about the dish — about the person

Protein in a day

0.83 g/kg

An adult Context established

Per day, 0.83 g for every kilogram of body weight — about 58 g a day for somebody of 70 kg. This is a floor: the amount that prevents a shortfall, not an optimum.

European Food Safety Authority, Dietary Reference Values for protein, 2012

Salt in a day

5 g 2000 mg

An adult Context established

Under 5 g of salt a day, which is under 2000 mg of sodium — just under a teaspoon. A label usually gives sodium, and the two are not the same number: salt is about 2.5 times the sodium.

World Health Organization, Salt reduction

What is done, and what is not: There is no calorie target here: daily energy need depends on age, body composition and training volume, and a figure written without them is a guess that looks certain. The protein calculation is offered because it rests on a sourced range and a single input. Supplements, and rapid weight cutting in weight-class sports, are conversations to have with a professional.

This choice is not stored anywhere.

Diets

Gluten-free Suitable as it is
Vegan Suitable as it is
Vegetarian Suitable as it is
Lactose-free Suitable as it is
Diabetes-friendly It depends Quickly digested starch. Cooling it builds resistant starch, and fat, protein, fibre or acid alongside it flattens the curve.

This verdict comes from the recipe\u2019s own ingredient list. The label on a packaged ingredient is always the last word.

Calculated nutrition

213.2 kcal
4 g Protein
27.4 g Carbohydrate
10.8 g Fat
5.2 g Fibre

Per serving, computed from raw weights as bought. Cooking drives water off and sometimes adds fat, and neither is accounted for.

composition figures unsourced · held in the system

After the heat goes off

Serving

Hot, with olive oil poured over. Lemon for whoever wants it, though if the vegetables are speaking for themselves it is not needed.

Keeping · 4 days

Four days in the fridge — there is no dairy in it, so it keeps well. The courgette softens by the second day.

Cooling and reheating

Five minutes on a low flame. Refresh the parsley after heating rather than before.

Freezes

Three months, though the courgette falls apart on thawing. If it is for the freezer, leave the courgette out and add it on the day.

What is left

Blended and reduced it is a cream soup; strained and the solids mashed it is a börek filling; as it is, it is the water for a pilaf.

For a child

From six months a baby can have it: unsalted, blended and with olive oil stirred in, it works as a first vegetable purée. For 12–36 months the diced version can be eaten with fingers, provided the cubes are under 1 cm.

If you have not got it

Celeriac → Turnip root Turnip cooks in the same time and belongs to the same group; the aniseed note of celeriac goes and a sharper one arrives.
Water → Meat stock Stock deepens it markedly and stops it being vegan.

Where to go from here

Boiling & poaching The method this recipe rests on
Potato What it does in heat, water and acid
Tomato What it does in heat, water and acid
Courgette What it does in heat, water and acid
Broccoli soup Similar method, or something that sits on the same table
Pumpkin soup Similar method, or something that sits on the same table
Celeriac soup Similar method, or something that sits on the same table
Budget Other recipes that answer the same need
One pot Other recipes that answer the same need
Freezes well Other recipes that answer the same need
Uses leftovers Other recipes that answer the same need
Vegan Other recipes that answer the same need
Seasonal Other recipes that answer the same need

Taste profile

What it tastes like

No axis sits clearly above the average: a balanced recipe.

Sweet 20
Salty 6
Sour 8
Bitter 12
Umami 14
Heat 2
Richness 13
Aroma 22

This profile is computed rather than measured: the role-weighted average of its ingredients’ taste vectors, shifted by what the cooking does. The thin line is the database average on that axis.

Computed similarity