Bethany's Vegan Kitchen

This is a hearty and filling, dairy free cheesy vegetable soup. I used a combination of dairy free cheese and nutritional yeast, to give this a lovely cheesy flavour. In regards to vegan cheese, I find it’s best to keep trying different ones until you find one you enjoy. Also keep in mind that most vegan cheese is quite different melted. Melting really mellows the flavour of most dairy free cheese

Yield; 3-4 servings Cook time; 30 minutes

You’ll need;

1. One tablespoon of dairy free butter
2. One large potato, chopped
3. Two carrots, chopped
4. One brown onion, chopped
5. Two cloves of garlic chopped
6. 60g dairy free cheese, grated
7. 400ml vegetable stock
8. 400ml plant milk
9. One teaspoon of dried parsley
10. One bay leaf
11. One tablespoon of nutritional yeast
12. Salt and black pepper to taste

Method;

• Add the butter into a saucepan over a medium heat. Once melted, add in the potato, carrot, onion and garlic. Fry for ten minutes to allow the vegetables to soften. As we’ll be blending the soup at the end, there’s no real need to cut the vegetables into very tiny pieces
• Pour in the stock, milk, herbs, and nutritional yeast. The milk you use doesn’t strictly have to be unsweetened, just make sure it’s no sweeter than dairy milk (5g sugar per 100ml) and doesn’t contain any sweet flavours, like vanilla for example. At this point you can also season to taste with salt and black pepper, personally I felt the stock added enough salt, so I just added pepper
• Cover with a lid and give the soup 15 minutes to simmer, stirring occasionally
• Finally remove the bay leaf, add in the cheese and give it five minutes to melt. Once melted, blend the soup until it’s completely smooth. I served mine with a little more grated cheese, and some freshly cracked black pepper

Bay leaf tip – If you have trouble picking out the bay leaves, try tying some food safe string around them. Then tie the other end of the string around the handle of a spoon (or other cutlery/utensil). Then you can just pull the string to remove the bay leaf. No more picking through your food to find them