Have you ever had one of those weeks where you slowly drift away from vegetables? When you count the lettuce on your BLT as the last meaningful green thing you ate? This was me recently. It happens. This soup brought me back.
The recipe comes from my friend (in my mind) Samin Nosrat – chef, author, teacher, activist, and creator of the Netflix show and James Beard Award Winning cookbook, Salt, Fat, Heat, Acid. I love this woman. She wants to help us all feel more comfortable cooking in our kitchens, and she’s damn good at it. In the early pandemic days, she inspired me to birth my first focaccia baby – it was special.
To help us all figure out what to cook during quarantine, she started a podcast called Home Cooking Show, with her friend Hrishikesh Hirway. It’s a delight and where I first heard about this soup.
Here’s what Samin writes in The New York Times – “The simplicity of this soup’s technique belies its depth of flavor, which is both vivid and complex. The soup is made bright with lemon and fresh with cilantro, but the secret ingredient is tahini, which is layered into the soup to thicken it, and then drizzled generously on top in the form of a gently spiced sauce. The result is a soup that’s both vegetal and creamy, tangy and rich. You’ll find it so tasty that you’ll forget you’re drinking your vegetables.”
This is a really thin soup, but it’s incredibly satisfying. I ate it warm the first night, with the beautiful drizzle of tahini, and moaned with every slurp. And then I drank it cold, from a glass, for the next week. This recipe makes A LOT of soup – two full quarts! You can easily halve it.
Samin wants us to use homemade stock, and I get it, it makes everything better. But I’m just not the kitchen goddess with stock in the freezer right now. I used a dab of my go-to veggie Better than Bouillan and it turned out beautifully.
This recipe is meant to adapt to whatever you have on hand. Have some frozen peas? Throw them in! Want to experiment with other herbs or vegetables? Use this as a template and make it your own.
PrintSpinach & Cilantro Soup with Lemon & Tahini
- Cook Time: 20 minutes
- Total Time: 20 minutes
Ingredients
SAUCE:
- 1/4 cup well-stirred tahini
- 1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
- 1 large garlic clove, finely grated
- 3/4 teaspoon sea salt
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
- 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
- 2 tablespoons water (plus more if needed, for consistency)
SOUP:
- 7 cups broth or stock
- 12 ounces baby spinach (12 packed cups)
- 4 cups roughly chopped cilantro (from two large bunches)
- 1/4 cup well-stirred tahini
- 2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
- Salt to taste
Instructions
- Make the sauce: Whisk together tahini, lemon juice, garlic, salt, cumin and red-pepper flakes with two tablespoons water in a small bowl. Add more water as needed until you get a drizzly consistency. Set aside.
- Make the soup: Trim the very ends of the cilantro stems, then roughly chop both bunches. No need to pluck the leaves! Cilantro stems have great flavor. Add stock or broth to a heavy pot and bring to a boil. Stir in spinach, cilantro, tahini and return to a boil. Add a pinch of salt here too, unless your broth was already pretty salty, like mine. Turn off heat and stir in lemon juice.
- Blend. Use an immersion blender or regular blender to puree soup. Taste and adjust seasoning with salt and more lemon, if desired.
- Serve. Serve immediately and drizzle with tahini sauce. Cover and refrigerate remaining soup and sauce for up to 1 week, or freeze soup for up to 1 month.
Notes
I’ve recently learned what really good tahini tastes like after finding my supermarket variety to be a bit too bitter. I’m obsessed with Soon tahini right now. It’s luxurious in texture and taste. And women owned, too!