This cold cucumber soup with yogurt and dill is a quick weeknight dinner fix on hot summer days. No need to touch the stove dial. Even better, no need to spend any more than 20 minutes in the kitchen.
This cold cucumber soup is a riff on classic Greek tzatziki sauce made with yogurt, cucumber, and dill. And it’s our answer to sweltering summer days. No stove required. Goes well with just about anything. Except maybe breakfast cereal.–Angie Zoobkoff
☞ Contents
Cold Cucumber Soup with Yogurt and Dill
Ingredients
- 3 large cucumbers peeled, seeded, and cut into 1-inch (2.5-cm) lengths
- 2 cloves garlic smashed
- 1/2 small red onion peeled and quartered
- 2 cups plain whole-milk Greek yogurt
- 1 cup full-fat sour cream
- Juice of 1/2 lemon (about 2 tablespoons)
- 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher orsea salt
- 1 teaspoon ground black pepper, or less to taste
- 1 cup fresh dill fronds coarsely chopped
Directions
- In the bowl of a large food processor fitted with a metal blade, combine all the ingredients except the fresh dill.
- Process until puréed and frothy, scraping down the sides once or twice with a spatula to ensure all the larger pieces have been smoothly incorporated, 3 to 5 minutes.
☞TESTER TIP: If your food processor is on the smallish side and you’re fearful of overflowing, simply toss everything together in a bowl and blend it in the processor in batches.
- Add the fresh dill and pulse about 10 times to incorporate.
- Cover and refrigerate until chilled through, at least 1 hour.
- Stir, taste, and adjust the seasonings if desired. You may need more salt and pepper than you expect to bring out the flavor of the soup since cold has a quieting effect on flavors.
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Recipe Testers’ Reviews
Inspired by the famous Greek sauce, this comfort food cucumber soup is so refreshing and has an intense cucumber, garlic, and dill flavor. It can be served as a first course instead of a salad or as a side dish with fish, such as salmon.
It’s really easy to prepare and just needs a couple hours in the fridge to develop all the flavors and chill.
This made a tasty and well balanced cold cucumber soup. All the flavors melded nicely—the sweet crunch of cucumber, the slight bite of red onion, the tang of the lemon juice, layered with the dill and black pepper.
Perfect for starter for a summer supper or as a lunch time meal.
This filled the entire bowl of my food processor. Depending on the size of your machine it might be better to mix ingredients in a separate bowl and process in batches. I pulsed everything for 4 minutes to get the consistency I wanted. I still had some crunch from the cucumber.
There is quite a bit of pepper and it slowly sneaks up on you. If you’re not a pepper fan, this could be reduced.
We had this for dinner and then again the next day for lunch. The amount of salt was perfect to bring out the flavours. We didn’t add salt at dinner and it was still the perfect amount at lunch.
Really pleased with this cold cucumber soup! It was very refreshing and, despite expressing doubts about cold soup, my testers kept going back for more. It tasted even better the next day so I’d recommend making this a day ahead. It took about 3 hours in the fridge to chill and was at its best super cold.
I used 2 super huge English cucumbers. I blended it for just over a minute—it wasn’t completely pureed but it got so frothy it started overflowing so I stopped. The soup had a nice texture with a bit of something to chew but no big pieces of anything.
This is a super easy and very flavorful cold cucumber soup. The recipe comes together so quickly by throwing everything in a food processor. The flavors are well balanced and the bits of green from the cucumber and red from the onion made for a very pretty presentation.
I processed the soup for about 3 minutes. The soup begins to separate at about 6 hours of chilling, but it was easily restirred to proper consistency.
I think it would go very well as an accompaniment to an afternoon tea with small sandwiches and lovely pastries.
I couldn’t think of anything more appropriate to test the week we had five straight days over 100 degrees. I’ve always been a fan of cold soups in the summer—my mom used to make a similar one that had beets pureed into it instead if cucumbers, but that also had that irresistible tart creaminess of sour cream punched up with fresh dill. To be honest, I liked this one even more. The cucumbers cut the richness and add some freshness that makes this soup such a perfectly balanced appetizer or light lunch.
And considering that I do, actually, put tzatziki sauce on basically everything when the weather gets hot, I could see this going with pretty much anything. We had it first with some grilled salmon, and it was predictably delicious. Another day, I put it out with some bread and cheese for a quick and fuss-free dinner. I’ll definitely be making this again!
I think 8 appetizer-sized servings are probably about right, but on the first night my husband and I had it, we probably consumed double that amount and made a full meal of it.
This is a tasty summer soup, a good use for your garden cucumbers, and is easy to put together in 15 minutes before chilling for an hour, which was enough time to let the flavors blend.
We used fresh mint, as we did not find fresh dill at the farmer’s market. Easily serves 8.
Originally published August 11, 2019
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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.
Helen Doberstein
What a delightful change from gazpacho for hot summer days. This chilled soup comes together in minutes and then hangs out in the fridge while you get the rest of your meal together.
Blending everything in the food processor was 5 minutes as I wanted to ensure it was very smooth. Chill time was about 30 minutes while I prepared the rest of the meal. We found after 30 minutes it tasted great but was too thick for our liking, so I used 1 cup milk to thin it a bit. We found it a refreshingly light start for our Greek Lamb Burgers and certainly worth making again and again.