Yellow Pea and Coconut Milk Soup

Deborah Madison does it again! This is an excellent split pea soup that’s richer than would be expected if you simply examined the ingredients. The soup alone is delectable; adding the spinach, rice, and yogurt brings out a whole additional level of complexity to the flavor that just makes it even better.

This yellow pea and coconut milk soup also reheats very well, though the color will not be as vibrant as the original.

Fabulous! This yellow pea and coconut milk soup has everything that you could ever desire in a dish—great flavors, great textures, and great appearance. The soup itself is reminiscent of an Indian dal, but ever so creamy, with a slightly sweet undertone.

The rice and spinach add a wonderful dimension, a wonderful tooth feel, juxtaposed with the soup and the smooth, spicy yogurt topping. And don’t omit the spicy yogurt topping—it complements everything else perfectly.

After I selected this recipe I began to have second thoughts. All those ingredients, all those steps, all those pans, and the blender too. When the soup was simmering and the smells began to fill my kitchen, I returned to my original thought that all those spices could blend into some really great flavor.

Blooming the spices by cooking them in the butter and onions eliminated any raw overtones and they had, as anticipated, evolved into a fantastically aromatic seasoning.

Thanks to a beautiful bunch of spinach from the farmers market and some leftover coconut milk, I had enough of the non-standard pantry items for this yellow pea and coconut milk soup to convince me to try it. That left me needing only the yellow split peas and a bunch of cilantro, which is easy enough considering the long-ish list of ingredients.

I soaked my yellow split peas for 5 hours and they cooked until softened in the 1 hour total mentioned in the recipe. This occurred despite the addition of salt to the beans right from the start of the cooking process. (I’d always been taught not to salt beans until they had softened, or else they would perhaps never soften. Because I trust Deborah Madison, I went ahead and salted, and I had no difficulty with the beans whatsoever. This makes me wonder if the no salting beans rule is an old wives tale, and it’s good to know it’s possible to cook beans in salted water without completely dooming your dish.)

I cooked the onions, along with the yellow split peas, until they were very soft in the hour’s total cooking time. Because the yellow split peas were very soft and because the onions had started as a small dice and were also very soft, I didn’t “puree” the mixture with anything other than a potato masher. I mashed everything right in the soup pot.

I stirred in the (full-fat) coconut milk, added the lime juice, salt, pepper, and chopped cilantro as directed, and found myself with a very substantial stewy soup, not at all a soup that I would describe as something that “starts out thin,” the words used in introducing this recipe. My soup started out very thick, and I thinned it down to bring it to a soupier texture and consistency. There would have been nothing wrong with a stewy concoction, but I had envisioned (and seen in the photo) something that definitely looked like soup. I was actually glad I did thin it out, because the addition of rice (I used white basmati) and spinach does have a thickening effect, though both also add texture and some different colored elements to the yellow of the soup.

Because this is quite a few steps (peas, onions, rice spinach), you may start to think it could be okay to skip the spiced yogurt—do not yield to this thought! Making this spiced yogurt takes just a few minutes, and again adds color, plus a fresh burst of flavor, to the soup. I served this with lime wedges on the side and accompanied it with a nice warm whole-wheat naan. It was a fantastic layering of flavors, both in taste and visually. The photo looks soupier than mine did, even with the addition of more water, and my spinach was more visible when the bowl was served.

Because this is essentially a bean soup, I’m not sure if it could ever be considered a “lighter,” dish, but it would surely lighten up a bit with the omission of the rice. I’d caution that this trade-off wouldn’t be wise, since part of the magic of this soup is in the layering of flavors and textures. The rice was tasty, the texture a positive addition, and the white next to the golden yellow of the peas and the green of the spinach a visual delight. The serving size of 6 to 8 was accurate in my house.

Lastly, I love the idea of using the cilantro stems, and will be seeking out additional ways of using them, ways that help to reduce the waste of buying a nice big bunch of cilantro, using just what the recipe calls for, nearly always just a very little bit, and then discovering some time later that the rest—the majority—of the bunch has become inedible from neglect.