Leek and potato soup

All home made leek and potato soup with croutons

This is authentic Team Work™: my partner prepared and cooked the leeks and potatoes, and I puréed them and prepared the croutons! ?

Ingredients

  • Leeks
  • Potatoes
  • Pepper
  • Salt
  • Butter, olive oil or coconut oil

Preparation

  1. Peel the potatoes, trim off the ugly bits in the leeks and possibly remove the outer leaf, as it tends to be quite sad looking. Wash everything thoroughly, to remove soil.
  2. Slice everything in quite small pieces—the smaller, the faster they’ll cook.
  3. Put in a pot with water and lots of pepper.
  4. Bring pot to a boil, and leave to simmer for about 45 minutes or an hour (until the potatoes start to break apart).Leek and potatoes
  5. For the croutons, I used dry bread left overs. Instead of throwing it away, I diced it and saved it in a box. So when I need croutons, I just put them in the pan with a bit of oil, salt and pepper, and fry them, tossing them in the pan until they’ve absorbed the oil (this also makes them not be hard like rocks anymore).

    Croutons-to-be in the pan
    In case you’re curious these croutons are made of rye and cranberry bread, which we got from Fabrique, our favourite London bakery right now.
  6. I used a blender to purée the potatoes and leeks, but if you’d prefer a bit more of texture you could use a fork or a potato masher accessory to roughly mash them.Pureed leek and potatoes
  7. Add butter (or your substitution of choice) to taste, mix well, and correct for salt after the butter is well mixed–specially if the butter is salted! Don’t add salt before. Adding some fat is essential because otherwise this soup can feel quite thin and insipid.
  8. Finally, serve with the croutons. And enjoy!

All home made leek and potato soup with croutons

This is so good for cold days ?

Options

You can make this vegan if you choose a vegetal oil instead of butter.

It might be interesting to experiment with other spices instead of just pepper: perhaps nutmeg? some moderately hot chilli?

My partner was really excited to experiment with the rice cooker, because it has a soup-making function, so we used that instead. With this method, it takes way longer to cook the soup: 2 hours! and that’s even if we added hot water to start with. But it can be programmed in advance and it has a “keep warm” setting, so it’s nice to find the soup waiting for you when you arrive home.

The fastest option would be to use a pressure cooker, in which case we would be done in about 15 minutes. You’d put everything on the cooker, add water to cover, close the lid, bring to pressure, reduce heat and simmer for 10-12 minutes, then turn the heat off, wait for the pressure to come down (or release it manually, depending on how hungry you are) so you can open the lid, and then continue from step 5. I so love pressure cookers! ??

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