This soup has the uncanny ability to conjure sunshine each time we share it, and a recent revisit made me fall in love all over again. Not just because it brings out the sun, but because cooking it this time round proved just how forgiving it is.
After a muddy harvest in Cape Town, unearthing carrots in the rain to cook for a mid-winter workshop, we served soup dodging the sun’s rays on an uncharacteristic 30°C day. In Berlin, it was planned for a cold snap with at least two consecutive days of hail, only to be cooked on one of the hottest, driest days of spring.
At that cooking meet it was made by many hands, the quantities had been multiplied to feed a larger group, it was made with veggie not chicken stock (and even that we forgot to add until the very end so it was largely made with water) and there wasn’t time to pass it through a sieve. Yet once plated and served, it looked and tasted just fine!
So don’t be deterred by my cut-to-the-centimetre croutons pictured above. In terms of method, this is like a pair of pants with an elasticised waist: it will adjust as needed. It has to, as the size of a ‘bunch’ of carrots and their final peeled and grated grammage will vary depending on the source.
Even when the vegetable drawer hasn’t seen fresh produce in days, there’s usually a bag of carrots at the bottom of it. And that means at the very least we can make sunshine soup.
The carrots: sweet or earthy
Let the ingredient lead. The flavour of a bunch of carrots can vary wildly. Since it’s the main ingredient, it will determine the flavour of the soup and, in turn, how you choose to finish it.
Uniformly shaped, sweet-as-candy supermarket carrots may result in a soup that enjoys being countered by a spoon of full-cream yoghurt on serving. But a gnarled bunch of carrots pulled from the ground just before cooking may not need it because their sweetness is more subtle and their flavour more earthy.
Their intensity will also influence where the final soup sits on the visual spectrum from bright orange to something more muted, like the colour of cling peaches.
The soup: thick and velvety
Carrots are not naturally soft, smooth or creamy so the soup needs to be nudged in that direction before blending. If nothing else, a potato will do it, but arborio rice lends an even more pleasing glossy texture. (We also tend to have it around because we cook a lot of risotto.)
The second step in optimising texture is to take the time to strain it. Although it may feel like an unnecessary step, straining a pureed soup through a sieve makes a huge difference in yielding a velvety texture.
The croutons: crunch and seasoning
Even the most pared-back soup can be finished with a topping that takes it to next-level flavour, in this case a buttered, spiced crouton.
Here separating out each process maximises individual flavours and maintains control. The butter is browned, the spices and croutons are toasted individually and only then are they all tossed together.