August is a bad lunch month. By now, summer has stretched on for so long that repetition has begun to bite. If you are like me, you will have spent the last few months eating so much salad that you are sick of it. But what else is there? Sandwiches are dull, and anything too substantial slows you down for the afternoon. If this were October, the answer would be soup, but October is still months away.
But wait! What if I told you that eating soup in the summertime is not an act of true lunacy, but a refreshing and light lunch option? Below are 10 fantastic summer soup recipes, each of them a step up from the humble gazpacho. Some are hot, some are cold, but all are delicious.
If the idea of chilled soup makes you nervous, River Cottage’s recipe for spiced watercress and yoghurt soup is a perfect place to start. A delicate stock, cooked and cooled and spun through a blender with watercress, garam masala and plain yoghurt, this is not only refreshing but it tastes as if it is making you healthier.
A great cold soup for guests is Andy Waters’ iced cucumber soup with feta crumble, which is guaranteed to impress. It is just cucumbers, coriander and mint blitzed to a liquid and livened up with vinegar and Tabasco, but it is delicious and looks a picture, thanks to the garnish of edible flowers scattered over the top.
A step on from this is EatingWell’s recipe for chilled melon soup. This, too, contains cucumber, but the star here is the melon, shot through with lime juice, orange juice, ginger and spring onions. You can use any variety of melon, but I prefer watermelon as there is something reassuringly invigorating about a bowl of ice-cold, bright pink soup.
I have never really got on with gazpacho. Whenever it gets hot, I hope my tastes will have changed, only to be disappointed yet again by the overwhelming acidity of it. Much better, in my opinion, is Serious Eats’ recipe for ajo blanco; a “white gazpacho” made with bread, almonds and garlic. For a cold soup, this is wildly rich and comforting. It’s substantial, too, which is not something you can say of many chilled soups.
The first cold soup I ever tried was naengmyeon, a cold Korean noodle soup. At the time, 20 years ago, the dish confused me: cold noodles in a cold soup seemed like heresy, but I have come to appreciate it a lot more over the years. Korean Bapsang’s recipe is a textbook offering. It is made from scratch, so you will need to be prepared to track down Korean radishes and pears, but it’s worth the effort. To keep things cool, you throw in a handful of ice cubes at the end. If that isn’t commitment to cold soup, I don’t know what is.
If you have frothed yourself into a rage by this point, because you are a soup purist and demand that all soup be served hot, relax. Not all summer soups have to be freezing cold; some are just light broths made with in-season ingredients. Felicity Cloake’s summer minestrone is the perfect case in point. It is a warm soup, made with the addition of courgettes, runner beans and asparagus, and it is light enough not to feel like a punishment on a hot day.
Similarly, kesäkeitto is a traditional Finnish summer soup (also served warm) of potatoes, carrots, peas and cream. Better still, it is incredibly easy to throw together. There is no sautéing or blending involved, just a lot of good ingredients cooked together at the same time. Food and Journey’s recipe is an excellent example.
Anna Jones’s recipe for coconut broth with buckwheat noodles and lime has a similar foundation to naengmyeon, in that it is a noodle soup, but this one is not freezing cold. There is coconut milk. There is lemongrass. There are lime leaves, chillis and coriander. It is an explosion, and sublimely pretty, too.
The Full Helping’s recipe for Thai carrot, coconut and lemongrass soup is similar, but for a couple of important changes. This is primarily a carrot soup, rich and orange and thick like a bisque, which makes it a little more comforting. Second, it works well served hot or cold.
I leave you with Yotam Ottolenghi’s recipe for chicken and buttermilk soup, which skilfully combines hot and cold. The soup itself is elegant and simple – there’s potato and lemon zest and a sprinkle of sumac, but not a lot else – but it is served with hot, fried chicken. This is Ottolenghi, so the chicken is beautifully tender, served up with what is basically the world’s best KFC dip. I don’t know about you, but this is exactly what I want in a soup, summer or not.
