Sweet potato soup with coconut milk. Easy, healthy, vegan, paleo. So incredibly complex, rich, and velvety smooth you’ll go wobbly in the knees. So ridiculously simple you’ll want to make it a weeknight staple.
This sweet potato soup with coconut milk melds the natural sweetness of sweet potatoes and maple syrup with the zingy jolt of ginger and lime juice. What results is complex, rich, and velvety smooth. And it’s easy, healthy, and creamy as can be. Everything in balance. Exceptionally little time or effort.–Angie Zoobkoff
☞ Contents
Sweet Potato Soup
Ingredients
- 1 tablespoon coconut oil
- 2 medium (14 oz total) red onions peeled and roughly chopped
- Sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper
- 3 1/4 inch piece fresh ginger peeled and sliced (about 1 1/2 oz or 40 g)
- 4 large sweet potatoes peeled and roughly chopped (about 1 kg)
- 8 1/2 cups store-bought or homemade vegetable broth
- 1/4 cup tamari, soy sauce, or coconut aminos
- 1/3 cup pure maple syrup
- Juice of 2 limes (about 3 tablespoons)
- 2 tablespoons coconut milk to garnish
Directions
- Combine the coconut oil, onions, and a pinch salt in a large, heavy-based saucepan over medium heat. Cover and gently cook, stirring occasionally, until soft and translucent, 5 to 10 minutes. Now add the ginger and sweet potatoes and toss to coat. Crack some black pepper and sea salt into the saucepan and cook, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes.
- Pour in the vegetable broth and bring to a boil. Immediately reduce the heat to a simmer, cover partially, and gently simmer until the sweet potato begins to fall apart when prodded with a fork, about 25 minutes.
- Remove the pan from the heat and let cool for 5 minutes. Purée until smooth using an immersion blender or, alternatively, you can let the soup cool for 10 minutes and then purée it in batches in a standing blender until smooth.
- Stir in half the tamari, maple syrup, and lime juice. This is when the soup really becomes your own. Taste it and then adjust the flavoring to your taste using more salt, tamari, lime juice, or maple syrup to create a deep, warm, sweet, lightly zingy soup that’s exactly to your liking. Dribble in a little coconut milk before serving.
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Recipe Testers’ Reviews
This sweet potato soup is a warm and comforting soup for cold snowy days. It’s easy enough to make for a weeknight meal. Cooking times were pretty much on point and the hands-on work is just peeling and chopping. After puréeing, the soup was rich and velvety. The taste of ginger was fresh and there was a rich note from the tamari. The maple provided a nice sweetness. I don’t think there is anything I would change about this recipe.
This sweet potato soup makes an easy, simple soup that gets a lot of flavor out of minimal ingredients. The hefty amount of ginger is the key here—it adds a spiciness and heat and more complexity that you might think. The cooking instructions work perfectly. The resulting soup is a fairly thin one, and if you want to bulk it up, some cooked noodles or rice could be added.
As usual, I was wrong. I prejudged this recipe and thought I would absolutely hate it. I was wrong. Somehow, ingredients like ginger, sweet potatoes, lime, and tamari all come together and produce something that tastes absolutely amazing! The soup is light, sweet, and spicy all at the same time. It comes together easily and is a must on those cold and sick days. When I first tasted the soup, I was experiencing stomach upset, but it was so good and soothing that I had 2 bowls! If you want something delicious and homemade that’s both satisfying and healing, please consider making this recipe for your next meal. Next time, I make this soup, I’ll keep it in the chunky form without blending it and add some more vegetables as I like a little heft to my soups.
The makings of this sweet potato soup include ingredients that we generally have on hand which made this recipe attractive to us on a weeknight. This is a simple and satisfying soup, ready to serve in about an hour. The flavor is deep and rich and we will make it again, but perhaps without the maple since the sweet potatoes made the soup plenty sweet for our taste. The lime juice is important.
Originally published February 25, 2017
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If you make this recipe, snap a photo and hashtag it #LeitesCulinaria. We'd love to see your creations on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
Irene Seales
This sweet potato soup is a beautiful, simple, and lovely vegan soup (the vegan part is a bonus—you can easily share this with vegans as well as omnivores!). The ginger can be as bright as you like—interpret the 3 1/4-inch-long piece of ginger as a thick slice and you’ll get a full gingery accent, use a thinner slice and you can be more gentle. You can control the salt either by using less tamari or a low-sodium tamari. The whole soup comes together in about an hour and you get a velvety smooth soup. It would be perfectly suited to serving as a first course or a main or as a party appetizer in demitasse servings. Besides a drizzle of coconut milk, I added a thin swirl of balsamic.