Hearty Vegetable Soup

This hearty vegetable soup recipe is the perfect comfort soup for cold days! It will instantly make you feel better! 

Vegetable soup is so effortlessly present in my life that I make it on auto-pilot. My mom used to make it, so I learned how to make it too and now I cook it every time once the cold season begins. That’s why today I decided to go into some detail about how to make a hearty vegetable soup, as it is a wonderful source of nutrients, vitamins, and comfort, so it can only benefit you to have it more often.

This hearty vegetable soup recipe is really easy to make. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any fresh herbswhen I made this. but make sure you add some fresh lovage, parsley, or celery leaves to it, for an enhanced flavor.

About the dehydrated vegetables mix: You can use any kind of veggie mix you like, but try to use one that is as healthy as possible – low in salt and free of mono glutamate monosodium/ E621. It is ideal to have a homemade condiment mix, so when the summer comes make sure you don’t forget to sun-dry some vegetables and prepare yourself an awesome-good-for-everything veggie mix. 🙂

Vegetable Soup Benefits

Vegetable soup offers a multitude of health benefits, making it an excellent choice to kickstart your meal. Packed with essential nutrients and fiber, it supports overall well-being and can aid in dieting, as it is very filling and generally low calorie. Moreover, its versatility allows for endless combinations of ingredients, ensuring you get your favorite veggies in a delicious, nutrient-rich broth.

Not only does vegetable soup provide a satisfying and nutritious option for any time of day, but it also allows for customization to suit individual tastes and dietary preferences. Adding ingredients like beans, legumes, pasta, noodles or rice enhances its filling and flavorful qualities, making it suitable as a light meal or hearty addition to your lunch. With its abundance of vitamins, protein, healthy carbs, and fiber, vegetable soup offers a low-fat, calorie-conscious option that can leave you feeling nourished and satisfied.

Top Vegetables for Healthy Veggie Soup

There are hardly any vegetables that can’t be used to make vegetable soup! You can create your own combinations based on the flavors that you like most and it will result on a delicious bowl of soup.

But if your imagination is failing you a bit, here are some of the most popular ingredients to make flavorful and healthy soups: carrots, potatoes, celery, onions, cauliflower, zucchini, and green beans are some of the most common ingredients. You can even add rice, pasta, and quinoa. Grains are also a great choice to make soups that are rich in both protein and fiber, such as: red beans, white beans, black beans, chickpeas, lentils, etc. Tomato is also a very popular ingredient, as well as mushrooms.

There you have it! All you need to know about vegetable soup. Go make your own combinations and let me know how it goes.

Types of Vegetable Soup

As you can imagine, there are a lot of types of vegetable soups just as there are many different ways to make it. It can be a bit confusing to tell the types of soup apart, I mean, it’s soup! How many ways can there be to make it? Well, it turns out there are quite a few ways.

• Clear soup: These are light soups, they’re the basic soup you make when you take water, vegetables, and seasoning and you put them together in a pot. They often include broth, which is the liquid that results from simmering meats and vegetables. It’s very flavorful and nourishing because all of the nutrients of the ingredients are concentrated.
• Creamy soups: They’re traditionally thickened with a white sauce such as béchamel—béchamel is made out of scalded milk whipped into a mixture of butter and flour. These creamy soups are smooth, and they look similar to heavy cream. The most common ingredients are celery, cauliflower, tomato, potato, artichoke, white onion, squash, etc.

The main difference between these two soups is that clear soups don’t make use of any type of thickening agent. Clear soups can also combine a lot of ingredients and you get the pleasure of tasting the different chunks of vegetables. Creamy soups usually just involve one or three ingredients and they’re turned into a cream with the help of béchamel.

• Chowder: Whenever a thickening agent such as flour has been used in a soup, it’s considered chowder. The clam chowder is the first example that comes to mind! They’re hearty soups with chunks of the main ingredients and garnishes.
• Stew: This is made from solid ingredients cooked in liquid; it can be water, wine, broth, even beer! The ingredients can vary widely, and it’s great to serve less tender cuts of meat because it’s a slow cooking soup. This is not that different from clear soups, except that the stew is thicker because it contains less liquid.