Vegetarian Potato Leek Soup Recipe

Vegetarian potato leek soup has to be one of the easiest soups to make on a weeknight. It is three ingredients and almost as few steps. I promise that regardless of your current cooking skill level you can make this dish in 30 minutes. Impress your friends and family and make this soon.

Baby it’s cold outside…

Well… cold for Florida. It finally dipped down to the upper 68 degrees here in Florida for a couple days, so its basically winter now. We have our windows open and the air conditioner is getting it’s annual 2 month vacation from running 24/7. If it gets any colder I’ll have to rummage through the back my closet to find one of the two coats I own. We might even have to break out the long-sleeve shorts northerners oddly refer to as pants.

It is soup weather

Basically, it is soup weather and I have the world’s easiest weeknight soup to fill you up on these chilly nights. Vegetarian potato leek soup to be exact. Not counting the spices you probably have in your cupboard already, the recipe is 4 ingredients.

Very few ingredients and very few steps means you can be eating this soup within the hour if you start now. The story on how I got to this recipe is entertaining, but feel free to skip it via the link just below.

Accidental 90% Vegetarian

I love to cook. My friends and family know I love to cook. So naturally, I tend to get cooking related items for my birthday and Christmas because it an easy win. Cookbooks are the most common gift I get in that line of thinking because they are easy to find and don’t need to be refrigerated. I have cookbooks from Alton Brown, The Great British Baking Show, Julia Child, and the chefs of Walt Disney World among general cuisine books.

A few years ago for Christmas, my mother-in-law went online and searched for a cookbook to gift me. In the search results was a #1 New York Times best selling cookbook from a group in southern California focusing on street food. Even better, the description noted they were hip, cool, and edgy so surely that was a good choice for a millennial who loves to cook. It even had a blurred out curse word on the cover… neat. Keep in mind my mother-in-law is one of the nicest people on the planet and I’m not even sure I’ve ever heard her curse.

Um, did you look through this book?

Christmas morning while everyone was busy opening their own gifts, I started skimming through the cookbook I received to check out the recipes. Something was off. First, it was literally full of curse words. Like a lot of them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m more than ok with the occasional curse word to emphasize a point but this book was going for the record. It just didn’t seem like something my mother-in-law would gift a person if she had read it herself.

Second clue was a page in the intro with the title “Hold the f*@% up, where’s the meat?”. That caught my attention. I quickly flipped through the recipes and realized it wasn’t just an edgy, curse-filled cookbook. It was a foul-mouthed vegan cookbook. I’m not vegan, or even remotely vegetarian when I got this cookbook, but I was hooked. Note: they changed their name in 2020 to Bad Manners Food after recognizing the insensitivity of the original name. Check out their recipes.

Vegetarian food?

A vegetarian lifestyle wasn’t even something I considered when I received that cookbook. I grew up in a meat and potatoes family and even entered local BBQ cooking competitions with my dad. I was no stranger to vegetables though since meat needed a friend on the plate, after all. Nothing against being vegetarian, I just didn’t entertain the idea honestly.

I like a good challenge and the recipes sounded delicious, so why not give a few of them a shot. Long story short, they were fantastic and easy to make. I fell down a rabbit-hole of other vegetarian dishes as a main course over the following year. We slowly transitioned from meatless-Monday to more nights each week being entirely vegetarian.

Am I vegetarian now?

Not entirely, but close. I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve cooked meat in our home over the last year. That said, we still occasionally eat meat when dining out. So, I’d say we are 90% vegetarian or what they call flex-itarian if you need a word for it. You do you but this works for us.

Vegetarian is also good for your health (on average) and good for the budget. I’ll leave the health claims aside for now because I am in no way qualified to provide the nuanced answer needed. Since changing out diet, we both lost over 40 pounds and don’t feel deprived in anyway. As for your budget, meat is expensive so simply cutting that out can save you a lot of money.

Wait… am I trying to convert you?

No, of course not. Will this recipe convince you to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle? Probably not, feel free to add some crumbled bacon or sausage on top to carnivore it up.

Will this recipe be so easy to make that you’ll have it memorized crank out on a weeknight? I think so. Vegetarian potato leek soup will probably end up on your recipe short list.

I’ve shared this recipe with a lot of family and friends. Everyone loves it. You will too.

Vegetarian Potato Leek Soup

A hearty, filling soup using only four ingredients anyone can make quickly on a weeknight. It is vegetarian too, but can be altered with any mix-in you like to suit your needs.

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Prep Time 15 mins

Cook Time 30 mins

Course Main Course

Cuisine Vegetarian

Servings 4

Calories 189 kcal

Equipment

• Stick blender (or blender)

Ingredients

  

• 3 Russet Potatoes
• 3 Leeks (medium size)
• 4 cloves garlic
• 4 Cups Vegetable Broth
• Salt & Pepper

Instructions

 

• Cut the potatoes into small cubes (leave the skin on)
• Chop up the garlic
• Cut off the leafy and bulb part of the leek, slice in half length-wise, then chop into thin half-moons. (don't stress here just get them uniform and small since we're going to blend it anyway)
• Clean the leeks in a bowl of water. They grow in sandy soil and always have a ton of dirt in them. Wash them off good unless you want a gritty soup.
• Heat up 1 tbsp of oil in a stock pot over medium
• Add in the leeks and saute for about 5 minutes or until they soften up
• Add in the garlic and potatoes and stir to combine, cook for 1-2 minutes
• Add the broth and a pinch of salt. Bring to a boil, then cover and reduce to simmer. Cook until the potatoes are tender, about 15 minutes
• Once everything is soft, blend it smooth. A stick blender here is easiest but transfer to a standing blender if you need to.
• Add whatever final seasonings you like: pepper, salt, cayenne, etc

Notes

Leeks: Leeks grow straight up out of the ground through very sandy soil. In doing so, they invariably become full of sand and dirt that can’t be washed out until you chop them up. Just dunk them in a bowl of water and swish them around to knock the dirt loose and sink to the bottom. Drop them in a strainer and you’re good to go.  Don’t skip this step unless you want sandy soup to crunch on.

Variations:

I love this soup because it is easy and delicious but also a great base for variations.

Don’t have leeks? Use onions (Vidalia sweet onions would be nice)

Add mushrooms to the leek saute for a creamy mushroom soup.

Add a jalapeno to the leek saute and top it with some cilantro for a Tex-Mex spin.

Don’t want vegetarian? Cook up some sausage or bacon on the side and crumble that into the soup after you blend it up.

The point is you can endlessly alter this base recipe to make a lot of different soups depending on your taste or fridge contents.

 

Keyword vegetarian

Note: feel free to find this and other recipes I’ve shared on my recipe page

Link to Plaza And Main St Recipes