Roast carrot and garlic soup with cashew nuts, chilli and lime

That's a terribly complicated title for a very simple recipe. It tastes like the BEST THING IN THE WORLD.

What you need for this to serve three to four people

Ingredients:

• some carrots - about 500 g or 1 lb would be good (see note below).  I think organic carrots taste far better, but YMMV.
• Some garlic - say, one clove for each carrot or about eight cloves for 500 g.
• One chilli or chillies of an appropriate strength, fresh or dried.  You can use powdered or flaked chilli if you wish
• One lime
• About 150 - 250 g of cashew nuts, not roasted
• 800 mL of good chicken stock; you can probably substitute vegetable stock if you want this to be vegan.
• Olive Oil
• salt and pepper.

When I was cooking this so that I could take pictures, I found fewer carrots in the fridge than I remembered having, and this number of carrots (shown in the picture) made around two healthy servings.  I think that this is around 250 g of carrots, but for three to four servings, use about twice as many as are shown in this picture:

(My phone lens has steamed up taking pictures of food, so these pictures aren't great, sorry).

 

Method

 

Preheat an oven to around 200 °C.  A fan oven could be slighty lower, and I believe that the gas oven equivalent to 200 °C is around Gas Mark 6. 

 

Peel your carrots and chop them into chunks. 

Pull a garlic bulb into enough separate cloves, and take the flakey, tissue-y skin off the bulbs by rubbing, leaving the tougher peel in place. 

The picture shows how much garlic I used for the four carrots above, de-tissued, but still in its skin:

 

I always use more than one clove per carrot because we're going to roast these unpeeled garlic cloves so that the inside is soft and creamy, with each clove being essentially a little sachet of roast garlic puree and absolutely delicious.  I know that I'll eat half of them before they get to the soup. 

 

Put the carrot chunks in a bowl with the unpeeled garlic cloves, add a glug of olive oil, salt and black pepper, and toss the carrot chunks and unpeeled garlic cloves into a roasting tin.  You do want the unpeeled cloves oiled.  It sounds like madness, but it makes a difference.

 

Roast the carrots for around 40- 45 minutes. 

The carrots need to be soft enough to be mashable, and are even better if beginning to char ever so slightly on the outside;  the garlic cloves need to be squashy when you press them, but not burnt. 

In my experience, the carrot can take about five to ten minutes longer than the garlic to get to the right state, so for absolute perfection, you could add the garlic cloves to the roasting tin about five to ten minutes after the carrots have been put into the oven and leave the carrots in for 45 minutes in total.  If you need to do something else and not fuss about the timing, it's absolutely fine to roast both for the slightly shorter period of time.

If you're using a fresh chilli, I'd add strips in around the same time that you add the garlic (I haven't tried this with fresh chilli yet, but you don't want it burnt to a crisp; I'd imagine that charred would be fine).




While the carrots are in the oven, make cashew nut butter.


Put your cashew nuts onto a small baking dish and stick them into the oven with the carrots for around ten to fifteen minutes.  You need to be careful not to burn them.  They should go in looking rather anemic and come out looking golden-brown.

The picture shows the cashew nuts after roasting.






Making cashew-nut butter is very simple, and totally bizarre.  You will put the cashews in a blender of some sort - I used an ordinary Kenwood Chef Mini - and grind and blend them until they turn into something like peanut butter.  The blending process seems to beat up the nuts until oil starts coming out of them.




The pictures to the right show the stages that the cashew nut crumbs go through as you blend.

 

At first the cashews make very a very fine breadcrumb texture




.After about three minutes, the fine breadcrumb texture begins to clag-up a little bit, looking like small bits of rubber, making bigger crumbs and sticking to the sides.  Keep blending and pushing the mixture down onto the blades.


 

After about seven to ten minutes, the mixture has the consistency of very dry plasticine and falls apart very easily when you try to shape it.  At this stage you need to add a very little olive oil - around a teaspoon, and blend to mix it in.  The oil instantly transforms the mixture; the more oil you add, the slacker the result.  I want to make quenelles out of these, so I'm careful to add the oil a drop at a time.
 

 

This picture shows the cashew-nut mixture after the oil has been added.  The mixture is not paler in reality but, interestingly, the shinyness of the mixture with added oil meant that more of the flash was reflected back to the camera and the whole picture became much paler as a result. I've reduced the brightness as much as I can so that you can see the texture. 

The mixture is pretty much like a smooth peanut butter, and firm enough to hold its shape when you quenelle it.

 

The carrots will probably have finished roasting by now, as well.  

 

 

Put all of the carrot chunks into a saucepan, and add the roasted garlic and the dry chilli, if you are using that. 

 

This bit is messy. Using a very sharp knife, chop off the end of one of your squashy roasted garlic cloves.  Squeeze the the soft puree inside the peel out onto the carrots in the saucepan.  Lick your fingers and repeat with the rest of the cloves.

 

When you've got as much roasted garlic into the pan as possible, use a stick blender to blend the garlic, carrot and chilli together.  Add the chicken or vegetable stock as you proceed, until you've got the consistency you want.  

 

With the amount of carrots shown in the picture at the top, I used about 400 ml of stock to get a thick soup that I could pour.

 

Reheat the soup in the saucepan, taste and add salt and pepper as necessary.

 

Place a quenelle (or spoonful, if you're in a hurry) of the cashew-nut butter into the centre of your soup dish.  Pour the hot carrot soup over the cashew nut butter and squeeze a quarter or a half of a lime onto the top of that. 

 

Don't stir the lime in - part of the joy of this soup is that not every mouthful contains the acidic lime; the lime is used as a condiment rather than an ingredient.  

 

Eat the soup with a small portion of the cashew nut butter in every spoonful - fantastic!  I like to eat it with rice cakes.