Make Instant Pot Turmeric Carrot Soup
According to Instagram memes, it’s time for three things: pumpkin spices, real pumpkins and warming up, refueling soups (even pumpkin soups!). I don’t really like pumpkin (or its spices) as a flavoring agent, but soup is something I can – and will – fuck with (hard).
Making soup is the easiest way to use up one ingredient in excess, and I had a lot of carrots. As we mentioned earlier , Instant Pot is the easiest and fastest way to get a large batch of creamy hot soup. You just sauté some flavors (right in the Instant Pot), add a root vegetable or zucchini and some broth and cook a heck of it under pressure. Hit the immersion blender (leaving it in the instant solution) and you’ve got the perfect pureed soup. Damn it, this thing will even keep you warm. Zucchini soups are good and good, but carrots are ubiquitous, cheap and deliciously sweet. They’re also incomparably easier to break than most zucchini, and this feature always brings the main points in my eyeglass book (which I keep under my pillow).
Turmeric is another very popular fall thing I’ve seen on Instagram, usually in latte form, and it pairs very well with carrots, garlic and ginger, which is great news because these ingredients were all invited to the Instant Potty Party. This soup, by the way, is vegan, not because I intended it, but because I ran out of duck fat and oil, so I turned to olive oil. The only other non-vegan ingredient I planned to use was chicken broth, and switching to vegetable broth meant I could give it to my vegan friend Ash, with whom I had plans for that evening.
Anyway. If you really want to use animal fat or broth, you know I won’t get you in trouble, but you really don’t need to. This soup is very spicy and aromatic. To make it you will need:
- 2 pounds carrots, coarsely chopped into 2-inch pieces
- 3 tablespoons olive oil
- 1 large shallots, diced or sliced
- 1 white onion, chopped or diced
- 1 2-inch piece of ginger, washed and chopped (skins can be retained).
- 1 tablespoon sesame oil
- 6 garlic cloves, minced
- 1 inch fresh turmeric, washed and sliced (skin may remain on it. Also: possibly wear gloves when chopping if you don’t want your fingertips to turn yellow).
- 1/4 cup sherry vinegar
- A small bunch of your favorite herbs tied with twine (I used 2 sprigs of thyme, 2 sprigs of marjoram and one sprig of tarragon).
- 4 cups vegetable stock (if you have very soft stock, add a tablespoon of non-chicken stock as well)
- 1/2 cup nutritional yeast (this is optional; I love the cheesy flavor they add)
Add olive oil to the instant pot and turn it on by pressing Saute. Add shallots, onions and ginger, season with salt and pepper, and cook until the onions are tender and the bottom of the insert is barely covered in the delicious, sticky toasted flesh. Add the sesame oil, turmeric and garlic and cook until the garlic is flavorful and golden around the edges. Add sherry vinegar and scrape off any toasted pieces with a wooden spoon. Add the carrots, herbs and stock, close the pot and press the Manual or Pressure Cook button. Cook at high pressure for seven minutes, then let it dry naturally for 10 minutes before manually relieving any remaining pressure. (This will help reduce splatter.)
Open the Instant Pot, take out the herbal bunch and add nutritional yeast. Blend all of this with a hand blender until no lumps remain. You should have a very thick soup. If you want a thinner soup, simply stir in some water, a quarter cup at a time, until you reach the desired viscosity of the soup. If you just need to be on trend, garnish with croutons, fresh herbs or pumpkin seeds.