Recipe – Carrot soup à la Nordic

Last week I started an online course, actually 2, about food. More specifically, one is called “The Science of Gastronomy” and the other “The New Nordic Diet”. The first one is a lot more scientific, as the name suggests and explains more background as to how this whole heat transfer thing works and impacts how we prepare food, how our senses shape how we experience tastes and flavours and comes with some fascinating experiments I wish my teachers would have done back in school.

The Nordic course, talks all about the New Nordic Diet. I didn’t realise that this was actually a proper term coined by the founders of renowned Noma in Copenhagen and probably contributed to the invasion of Scandi food and design over the past 10 years. Besides the course being a bit, erm, flat and not really a course in my opinion, I was intrigued what kind of food that would be. So I googled, got inspired and had an idea. As it so happened, we got a load of carrots and I always wanted to get THE carrot soup right and I might have just done that this time around.

What you need

Serves 4 people.

For the soup

• about 600g carrots
• 2 onions
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 2 tbsp rapeseed oil (or other oil)
• 100ml apple cider vinegar
• 200ml vegetable stock
• 1l water
• Salt and pepper

For the dressing

• 200ml yoghurt (dairy or non-dairy)
• Parsley
• Oregano
• Thyme
• Salt and pepper

This is how you do it

The soup

1. Cut the onions into small pieces and, in a pot, fry in the oil for 3-4 minutes on a medium heat. Add the chopped garlic half way.
2. Add the carrots (wash/peel and cut them into small pieces) and add plenty of salt and pepper.
3. Stir everything and add the lid to sweat the vegetables for about 5 minutes, stirring them occasionally. Lower the heat a little, as you have the lid on.
4. Add the apple cider vinegar and vegetable stock, increase to medium heat and let the liquid reduce to half.
5. Add a litre of hot water (I boil mine in a kettle) and let everything boil for 20-25 minutes or until the carrots are soft.
6. Blend it all in a blender (hand blender will also do).

The dressing

1. If you have a blender, add all the ingredients in there and blend. Depending on taste, you may want to add more of a particular herb.
2. If you prefer, you can also just cut the herbs finely and mix it by hand with the yoghurt.

Serving
Simply add a spoonful of the yoghurt dressing on top of the carrot soup and serve it.