Chunky Vegetable Soup with Beans

Filling, delicious and nutritious, this chunky vegetable soup is perfect for kick starting the new healthy you. It’s vegan, fat free, low in calories and quick to make too. Perfect for the 5:2 diet and Veganuary.

I do love a good soup. Which is lucky as I eat an awful lot of them, especially in the colder months of the year. Since I acquired my Froothie Evolve, I’ve been making them even more than usual.

This amazing piece of kit not only blends, but makes soups too. Both smooth and chunky. Take a look at my squash and red pepper soup to see a smooth version.

Chunky Vegetable Soup with Beans

This chunky vegetable soup recipe is a very simple one, but it makes for a really easy and healthy meal. It’s surprisingly delicious too.

Once you’ve prepared the vegetables, all you need to do is throw everything into a pot and cook it. You can’t get much simpler than that. No frying, roasting or using a load of different pots, pans and utensils. It makes washing up a lot easier.

I tend not to add too much salt to my cooking, so you might want to up the quantity stated in the recipe to suit your taste. On the other hand, if you’re on a low salt diet, you may need to reduce it.

I’ve used vegetable bouillon powder rather than a stock cube as I’ve found a particularly good brand from Suma which I now stick to. It’s a low salt version and organic too.

If you make this chunky vegetable soup on the stove top, it’s best to add the miso right at the end. Once the soup has stopped boiling that is. Miso is a fabulous ingredient. It’s not only very tasty, but it’s full of various vitamins as well as folic acid.

A good fermented miso paste should be unpasteurised so that we benefit from the beneficial gut bacteria it contains. So if you boil it, all of those lovely bacteria get destroyed. It’s fine to add it to hot liquids, just not boiling water. For the Froothie Evolve, however, I’ve just bunged it in along with everything else at the beginning. It’s meant to be a no fuss method of making soup after all.

I actually used Hodmedod’s fava bean umami paste, which is a sort of British miso.

Can I Use Different Vegetables?

The wonderful thing about a chunky vegetable soup, is that you can use pretty much whatever veg you fancy. It’s the sort of soup that’s great for having a fridge clear out. Feel free to swap any vegetables for those given in the ingredient list. It will very much depend on what time of year you’re making the soup as to what is seasonally available.

Celery

Celery is a fantastic vegetable for adding calorie-free flavour to soups and stews. It lasts quite a long time in the fridge, so it’s well worth keeping some in stock. It’s by no-means vital for a delicious chunky vegetable soup though. You could, perhaps, substitute it with a sprig or two of fresh herbs such as rosemary or thyme.

Leeks

Some sort of allium is de rigour when it comes to soups and stews. They add much in the way of flavour and health benefits. But it doesn’t have to be leeks. You can use onions, shallots or even wild garlic instead.

Potatoes

I’ve added potatoes to help bulk up the soup and to provide additional nutrients. If you use skin-on potatoes, they are surprisingly nutritious. However, sweet potatoes would do a very similar job. If you’re going to use sweet potatoes, you might not want to include other sweet vegetables such as carrots though.

Carrots

It doesn’t seem to matter how often I use carrots, there are always some hanging around the house begging to be used. So carrots go into many of my soups and stews. They’re also cheap and easy to get hold of all year around. But instead of, or as well as, carrots you could use other root vegetables such as parsnips, swede or celeriac.

Beware beetroot however. It can take quite a long time to cook and it will colour your soup purple. Just take a look at my beetroot miso soup if you don’t believe me. And apart from anything else, CT hates beetroot.

Courgette

I just happened to have a courgette in the fridge at the time I made this chunky vegetable soup. It’s nice to have a softer vegetable in the soup to provide textural variety. But sweet peppers or squash would be lovely too.

It’s also good to have some different colours in the soup. This is not only because it usually looks nicer, but eating a rainbow of colour provides a good mix of nutrients. Some sort of cabbage, kale or green beans would do the job perfectly.

Butter Beans

Butter beans are one of my favourite pulses. They have a nice flavour and a creamy texture which I find particularly appealing. But for the soup you can see in this recipe, I used something a bit different.

We grow a variety of white runner bean in the garden specifically for the mature shelled beans, not the young green pods. Some of you may know them as gigantes, so well known in Greece. They’re really delicious and similar in size and flavour to butter beans. The very last of the crop went into this chunky vegetable soup.

Pulses provide a lot of nutritional benefits as well as bulk. So they’re great for soups and stews. So swap butter beans for black beans or red kidney beans or whatever your favourite happens to be. But for a chunky soup, it’s best to go with something fairly large, so perhaps not lentils or small beans such as aduki.

Froothie Evolve

You don’t need a Froothie Evolve for this recipe as you can make it very easily on the stove top. The advantage of the Froothie Evolve, however, is that you just bung everything in, select the chunky soup option then walk away for thirty minutes until it’s done. When I have something simmering away on the stove, I feel I need to come back regularly and check it’s not boiling over or if it’s even cooking at all.

Having said that, there are a couple of things to note:

1. It’s best to put the harder veg at the bottom of the blender and the softest at the top. I made sure the potatoes, carrots, celery and leeks were at the bottom and the courgette on the top. This will ensure the veg cooks properly. The blender kicks in on low a few times throughout the cooking cycle which means some of that harder to cook veg gets chopped a little in the process.
2. Don’t overfill the jug. You shouldn’t really have it above the top 1,400 ml mark. As you can see I stuffed rather more than I should have done in and it was absolutely fine. But I tried to pack even more in on another occasion and it cut out on me. I had to wait for thirty minutes for the motor to cool down, then I removed some of the contents and tried again. It was fine the second time around. You live and learn.
3. There are more options than the Froothie Evolve. Much as I love this machine, I’m also attached to the Optimum 9200a, which was the first power blender I ever used. It’s a much cheaper option but still a most powerful beast. You can read more about it in my review.

Other Fat-Free Soup Recipes You Might Like

• Beetroot miso soup via Tin and Thyme
• Celery & leek soup via Lavender and Lovage
• Creamy vegan tomato bisque via Yumsome.
• Lettuce & pea soup with new potatoes via Tin and Thyme
• Simple fat free spinach soup via Fab Food 4 All
• Swede soup via Thinly Spread

For more delicious soup recipes, take a look at my soup category.

Keep in Touch

If you’d like more blender recipes, follow the link and you’ll find I have quite a lot of them. All delicious, of course.

Choclette x

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5 from 11 votes

Chunky Vegetable Soup with Beans

Filling, delicious and nutritious, this simple soup makes for an easy and healthy meal. It’s vegan, fat free and low in calories. Can be made on the stove top or in the Froothie Evolve.

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Prep Time5 minutes mins

Cook Time30 minutes mins

Total Time35 minutes mins

Course: Lunch, Main Course

Cuisine: British

Keyword: butter beans, carrots, miso, potatoes, soup

Servings: 2 people

Calories: 331kcal

Author: Choclette @ Tin and Thyme

Equipment

• power blender

Ingredients

• 2 stick celery washed & trimmed
• 1 leek washed & trimmed
• 4 small potatoes scrubbed with skin on
• 1 large carrot scrubbed with skin on & trimmed
• 1 courgette (zucchini) washed & trimmed
• 1 tsp vegetable stock powder or stock powder (I use a low salt version)
• ½ tsp sea salt
• 1 tsp brown miso paste (I used Hodmedod’s fava bean paste)
• 2 bay leaves
• 400 ml tinned butter beans (lima beans) drained and rinsed (I used fresh white runner beans)

Metric – US Customary

Instructions

• Slice the celery and leeks and place in a pan or the heating jug of the Froothie Evolve.
  2 stick celery, 1 leek
• Cut the potatoes, carrots and courgette into chunks and add to the pan or jug.
  4 small potatoes, 1 large carrot, 1 courgette (zucchini)
• Chuck in the remaining ingredients, then either: 1) top up the Froothie Evolve jug to the 1,400 ml level with water 2) use the butter bean tin to add about 800ml of water.
  1 tsp vegetable stock powder, ½ tsp sea salt, 1 tsp brown miso paste, 2 bay leaves, 400 ml tinned butter beans (lima beans)
• Ask the Froothie Evolve to make your chunky soup or select the programme. Alternatively, if using the stove top, bring the soup to a boil. Cover, turn the heat down then simmer for 20-25 minutes until everything is soft. Keep an eye on the water level, you might want to add a bit more as it cooks.

Notes

The quantities given will feed two as a main meal and four as a light lunch.

Feel free to swap out any of the vegetables for whatever you have to hand.

Please note: calories and other nutritional information are per serving. They’re approximate and will depend on exact ingredients used.

Nutrition Estimate

Calories: 331kcal | Carbohydrates: 69g | Protein: 14g | Fat: 1g | Saturated Fat: 1g | Cholesterol: 1mg | Sodium: 1532mg | Potassium: 1815mg | Fiber: 14g | Sugar: 9g | Vitamin A: 6213IU | Vitamin C: 44mg | Calcium: 119mg | Iron: 5mg

Tried this recipe?Leave a comment below letting us know how you got on and do share a photo on Instagram. Tag @choclette8 or use hashtag #tinandthyme.

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