Potato and leek velouté
A soup that argues its own case for the sieve
Doubles cleanly in a wider pan. Freeze it in single portions before the cream goes in, for up to three months, and stir the cream in as you reheat.
Leek is one of the more contested vegetables in this book, and the reason is texture rather than anything else. Raw or under-cooked it is genuinely stringy, which is exactly the problem this diet is built to avoid. Sliced very finely and sweated slowly in butter until it has melted down to almost nothing, then blended and pushed hard through a sieve, it stops being a risk and becomes the whole point of the soup, a soft green sweetness behind the potato. This is a velouté in the proper sense, thickened by the vegetables themselves and finished with cream rather than flour, and it freezes better than most soups in the book.
Ingredients
Contains: Milk, Celery
- 30 gunsalted butter
- 2leeks, white part only, about 200 g trimmed, halved lengthways and sliced as finely as you can
- 300 gpotato, peeled and cut into 2 cm dice
- 600 mlclear vegetable stock, strained, or a good stock cube
- 100 mldouble cream
- salt
Method
Melt the butter in a large pan over a low heat. Add the sliced leek and a pinch of salt and sweat gently for 15 minutes, stirring often, until it has collapsed to a pale, buttery heap with no squeak and no resistance left in a slice when you press one.
Add the potato and stock, bring to a simmer and cook for 20 minutes, until a piece of potato falls apart against the side of the pan under gentle pressure.
Blend the soup with a stick blender until it is completely smooth and you cannot see a single fleck of green in it.
Push it through a fine sieve into a clean pan, pressing hard with the back of a ladle so no strand or fibre of leek gets through.
Stir in the cream, warm gently without boiling, and season with salt.
Watch-points
- Use the white part of the leek only, and slice it as finely as you can before it goes in the pan. Cooking it right down to melting, rather than only softening it, is what makes it safe.
- Blend and then push the soup through a sieve so every strand of leek is caught.
- Peel the potato before it goes in.
- Use a clear, strained stock with no vegetable pieces of its own.
Some hospitals allow well-cooked leek, white part only; the leaflet this book follows does not. Leave it out if you have been told to, and use a little extra potato in its place.
Stoma note: Potato and cream make this a thickening soup overall. Leave the leek out, as above, if it has caused wind for you before.
Make it more nourishing
- Stir in an extra 50 ml of cream at the end. That is about 220 kcal across the two bowls.
- Beat 2 tablespoons of skimmed milk powder into the cream before it goes into the pan, for roughly 5 g more protein a bowl.
- Finish each bowl with an extra knob of butter, about 15 g, melting on top.
Swaps
- Instead of leek, use an extra 100 g of potato and a little more butter
- keeps the same silky base if you are leaving the leek out
- Instead of vegetable stock, use chicken stock
- adds more depth if the vegetarian version is not a requirement