Asparagus and Tarragon Velouté (Dairy-Free Creamy Asparagus Soup) Recipe

Don’t get me fallacious: I’ve acquired nothing in the direction of cream soups. Cream of mushroom. Cream of spinach. Cream of hen. I actually like all of them generally. Nonetheless the issue about cream soups is that dairy fat has a method of coating the tongue and dulling vegetable flavors. A cream of asparagus soup may fashion like rich, creamy asparagus, nonetheless you’d on no account describe it as vibrant. For those who want a really vibrant however creamy vegetable soup, it’s a must to eliminate that dairy fat.

So how do you make a super-creamy soup with no cream the least bit? There are a couple of strategies to get there. Sometimes I’ll use bread to thicken my soups, as on this 15-minute tomato soup. The other technique is using a primary French preparation known as velouté. The phrase comes from the equivalent root as velourand, equivalent to a neon velour tracksuit, velouté is {{smooth}}, suave…let’s merely associate with velvety and vibrant.

Making a Velouté

In classical French delicacies, velouté is technically a sauce made by thickening stock with a butter- and flour-based roux. Suppose béchamel with stock in its place of milk. These days, if you see the phrase on a menu, it’s more often than not referring to a velvety, satiny soup with comparatively little to no dairy fat.

I start my asparagus/tarragon mannequin by sautéing aromatics in olive oil. For sweet asparagus, I select the fragile style of spring leeks to onions. Celery or garlic is more likely to be frequent picks proper right here as successfully, nonetheless I decided to utilize a thinly sliced bulb of fennel in order to strengthen the anise style of the tarragon.

I sauté the greens with a pinch of salt in order to help draw out moisture, then, as quickly as they’re completely softened, I add a pair tablespoons of flour, stirring it until it’s blended with the oil throughout the pot. Subsequent, I pour in just some cups of hen stock. You’ll moreover use vegetable stock, nonetheless make sure to make use of a hand-crafted one; store-bought vegetable stock is form of universally horrible.

As quickly as all of it entails a simmer, I add some chopped asparagus and a handful of minced modern tarragon leaves. I tried making a mannequin of the soup whereby I sautéed the asparagus sooner than together with the stock, nonetheless I found that it didn’t really present a style profit, and resulted in a soup with duller shade.

To make points additional fancy, I like to pull out just some asparagus options after solely a minute of simmering, as soon as they’re nonetheless vibrant inexperienced and crisp. They make a superb garnish for the finished soup. I proceed simmering the rest of the asparagus until it’s tender, only some minutes longer, then hit it with a squeeze of latest lemon juice to brighten it up.

Ending the Soup

For those who want it utterly velvety-smooth, you probably can swap the soup to a extremely efficient countertop blender and let ‘er rip, passing it by the use of a fine-mesh strainer afterward. If a still-pretty-smooth-but-a-little-more-rustic purée is okay by you, then  handheld immersion blender will do the trick, with the additional benefit which you may purée the soup correct throughout the pot. (Merely be careful of splash-back. I coated my counter and shirt in inexperienced slime, Double Dare–vogue, at least as quickly as whereas creating this recipe!)

Like modern asparagus itself, this soup is a sort of which may be biggest eaten correct after they’re made. It cooks so shortly that the purée should nonetheless have a vivid inexperienced shade. It can nonetheless fashion good if you chill it and serve it the next day, nonetheless it’s going to boring to a colorless yellowish inexperienced by the purpose you could have reheated it.

I want to garnish my soup with additional chopped tarragon, among the many wispy fronds from the very best of the fennel, the asparagus options, a drizzle of olive oil, and solely a contact of crème fraîche.

Okay, so I assume crème fraîche is technically dairy fat. Sue me.

April 2017

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