Smoky BBQ Winter Vegetable Soup

A spin on a trusted winter favourite, winter vegetable soup on the BBQ? Surely not? My perfect smoky BBQ winter vegetable soup is a warming delight.

This is a recipe for a soup which is cooked in the wok pan on a BBQ. It gets a smoky taste from the wood chunks added to the charcoal during the cooking process.

These types of winter warming dishes are excellent to help make you feel comfortable on cold nights. Served with a thick piece of sourdough bread or accompanied by some of my sourdough starter crackers and butter, it is sure to get you feeling cosy.

Contents

• Introduction
• Ingredients
• Instructions
• Variations
• Equipment
• Storage
• Serving suggestions
• The Recipe
• Your Comments

Introduction

I love soup and winter favourites like it. Nothing beats a crusty loaf of buttery bread dipped in to some warming soup on a cold dark winter evening. I cooked this one on the BBQ. You can cook this in a wok or dutch oven using gas or charcoal. Either way it works and there is no right or wrong way, just whatever you have available.

Flexible ingredients

This dish is so flexible by allowing you to add and remove vegetables any way you want, not all the ingredients are needed and some can be added or replaced as you wish. At the end it all gets blended down so makes it easy to chop and change where necessary.

Ingredients

The dish has a wide variety of ingredients that you can use to make this soup. While this post focuses on winter vegetables, all seasonal veg will work. So in the summer there may be more peppers and tomatoes available. These can be added.

• Onion - I like to use white/brown onions when it comes to cooking in a soup. I prefer red onions for a salad or eating raw. The flavour of the brown onion is strong and offers a good starting point for any soup dish. Dice the onion quite small to make blitzing it in the pan a little easier later on.
  
• Pepper - Peppers come in the usual Red, Yellow, Green stages. For a soup I like a yellow or a green pepper. In the recipe pictures is a yellow pepper but normally I'd opt for a green for a winter soup. I find the green peppers offer a more earthy flavour.
  
• Carrots - You can add the carrots either washed and unpeeled, or peeled. Just chop off the stalk and tip before slicing and dicing them. The skin has a lot of nutrients in there so for an easy but healthy winter vegetable soup, leave the skins on.
  
• Leek - A leek is from the onion family and in a soup it offers some good substance to the dish. A firm slice into 1cm sections will be good enough when preparing the veg. The leek will uncoil and section off when chopped up but this is ok.
  
• Potato - You can use any potatoes that you have available for this soup. The liquid stock will be cooking the potatoes through and that means they do not need par boiling. I would advise that the potatoes are peeled and diced into 2cm cubes before going into this dish. Try to keep the potato chunks as uniform as possible for even cooking.
  
• Celery - Much like the leek, the celery just adds some base to the soup. They won't break down much when cooking but when the blending takes place they will get sliced in that.
  
• Vegetable Stock - One of the fundamental parts of the soup is the stock. This recipe calls for a vegetable stock cube in which I use a Knorr stock cube dissolved in water. You can make your own stock from left over chicken dishes or use other types of stock cubes or the jelly like stock pots for different options. There are also tubs of pre prepared stock liquids which you can buy for ease.
  
• Single Cream - A simple addition for the recipe but it brings the whole dish together. Cream will bring the texture to the soup but will also absorb the smoke flavour from the BBQ coals.
  
• Salt and Pepper - Where would we be without seasoning. Keep in mind that there is salt in the stock already, so as with all cooking taste as you go and add a little seasoning at a time. If you happen to add too much salt, balance it out with some more cream or some lemon juice.

All the amounts for the soup are noted on the recipe card at the end of this post.

Instructions

The main process for this dish is to prepare the veg, simmer it for a while and then blitz it into a soup.

Variations

As noted earlier, the options are endless when it comes to swapping out the vegetables in this soup. It can be a meat lovers delight, vegetarian or even a vegan delight in the following ways:

Meat lovers - Add in some gammon or some ham hock, maybe something from a BBQ ham recipe chopped into chunks and mixed into the soup. The consistency would be that of a warming ham hock soup or pea and ham soup. You could even make it into a winter vegetable chicken soup by adding in some cooked chicken pieces.

Vegetarian - This smoky winter vegetable soup is a vegetarian dish if you follow this recipe as written. There is no meat and the stock is made from vegetables too.

Vegan - Aside from the cream, everything else in this recipe is vegan friendly. you could add some more protein to the dish by introducing a selection of beans or lentils. This would turn the dish into more of a smoky BBQ beans recipe and opens up to being a vegan option at a family BBQ.

Equipment

The BBQ I use is a charcoal Weber Master touch BBQ. It is my barbecue of choice due to the flexibility of the available components such as the wok pan and steamer kit which is a part of the gourmet BBQ system from Weber.

The wood chunks I use are the Weber ones again but sometimes I use fruit based chunks such as apple or cherry depending on what I have available to me. Soaking the chunks prior to use will mean the smoke lasts a little longer and is not overly strong.

Storage

The soup can be made in bulk and then stored in portions of your choosing. For easy storing I recommend using takeaway style tubs for storing the soup in. A portion size of about 300ml is a good lunch time amount. (A regular can of soup is 400ml so you can use that for comparison.

When dishing the portions out, use either a measuring jug to get equal amounts, or decide on what you want to put in each dish and then weigh it out on a set of digital kitchen scales for a more accurate reading. These digital kitchen scales from Salter are a good value set which will last a long time. This is particularly useful if you are having soup as part of a weight loss plan.

You can then store the soup in the fridge for a few days to a week. In the freezer it will last as long as 6 months.

Reheating soup from the freezer

It is best to defrost before reheating. I have found that ice crystals can form in the soup when it is frozen and then the soup ends up being quite watery once defrosted. If you open the takeaway container up carefully once the soup has defrosted there might be a layer of water across the top before the soup. It should be quite easy to pour this off, or absorb with kitchen roll before reheating.

For ease, you can reheat in a pan and the water will evaporate off that way. Without boiling the soup, bring it to a gentle simmer and then get it down to the appropriate consistency you require.

Serving suggestions

Try serving this dish with a chunky loaf of white bread from one of my bread recipes. In the featured image photo for this post I have the soup shown along side a few slices taken from my sourdough in the working day bread recipe.

The Recipe