We love soup from our pressure cooker. It’s easy, cheap, quick, delicious. What’s there not to like? Oh, yes, and it’s healthy too. So, here’s a new one: creamy leek and sweet potato soup.
One of the challenges of traveling in South Korea is buying food in small quantities, especially in supermarkets. Forget about buying rice in less than a 1.5-liter bag, that’s about the smallest size you’ll find. It is more common to buy rice in, oh let’s say, 10 or 20-kilo bags.
Where to leave all that in our Land Cruiser? Fortunately, in open-air markets you may find foods like legumes and rice at a requested quantity.
The trickier issue is vegetables. Simply forget about buying 2 or 3 bananas; you have to buy the bunch. Or garlic, buying just 1 or 2 bulbs is a quest in itself as here they are sold by the dozens (note the plural).
Anyway, what to do with a bundle of 10 pieces of leek? Making soup seemed the only answer to me, and so that’s what I did. I also found some sweet potatoes, I still had a lot of cherry tomatoes that had been given to us by a woman who had harvested them in her vegetable garden.
That’s how I got my ingredients.
Leek & Sweet Potato Soup (3-liter Pressure Cooker)
Ingredients
- 5 pieces of leek
- 2 sweet potatoes
- 2 hands full of cherry tomatoes
- 1 carrot
- a quarter of a garlic bulb
- a teaspoon of coconut oil
- I still had a handful of bulgur left, so decided to use that too
- Spices: salt, pepper, curry powder, coriander powder, and cumin
Tools & Equipment
This is what we use to prepare soup in the pressure cooker:
- Coleman stove
- Pressure cooker
- Global knives
- Lansky sharpener
- Cutting board
- Wooden spatula
- Bamix hand blender
For a full list of kitchen gear we use in the Land Cruiser, take a look at this overview.
Preparation
- Heat a teaspoon of coconut oil in the pressure cooker.
- Add garlic and spices.
- Add a bit of water when necessary to let the garlic and spices simmer for a minute.
- Add all vegetables and bulgur (and cut more leek until the pan was full).
- Fill up with water.
- Close the lit, bring it to a boil, let it cook for 5 minutes, and turn off the heat, leaving the pressure cooker closed for about 20 minutes.
- Turn it into a smooth, creamy soup using a Bamix hand blender, which is our latest purchase for our kitchen and on which a blog post will follow.
Quinoa as Topping
I always like to add something to give the soup a bit more of a bite. This can be (leftover) rice or legumes, but now I still had a big bag of quinoa. Now that’s a quick one in the pressure cooker!
- Rinse 2 espresso cups of quinoa in water to remove the saponins.
- Bring 3,5 espresso cups of water with a pinch of salt to a boil.
- Add the quinoa to the boiling water.
- Close the lid and right away (!) time 2 minutes, after which you turn off the heat, and let it sit for 8 minutes.
So, contrary to the regular pressure-cooking method, when you start timing only after you start hearing the whistle, this is not necessary with quinoa. Remember: just 2 minutes as soon as you close the lid.
Add one or two tablespoons of quinoa to your soup and you have a perfect meal.
Bon appetite!
Read More: Why Bring a Pressure Cooker on Your Overland Trip
Books on Cooking Soup
(click on the images to look inside)
Products from Amazon
Tips, Suggestions, Feedback?
Do you have a favorite soup you’d like to share? Feel free to do so in the comment section below!
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Thanks for this post ~ it’s finally convinced us to buy a Futura pressure cooker. I grew up in South Africa and my mother always used a pressure cooker to feed 4 hungry kids for really healthy & uber quick meals! We love the many healthy recipes on your website and enjoy fish & veggies so having a pressure cooker should revolutionize our meals. Will let you know how we get on with the Futura ~ bon appetit..!
We made this the other night and it was fantastic. We own two pressure cookers – a 3L and a 5L. Since i know you use a 3L, I started with that one, but my ingredients where over the top so I transferred it to the 5L cooker.
Sometimes I find the 3L a bit small too, esp. when making large quantities of e.g. soup. But the 5L is just too big for in our car I find.