Cream of asparagus soup

Rank kitchen

This spring, the garden was very generous with asparagus, which allowed me to prepare a cream of asparagus soup, velvety and delicious, of which I was able to freeze a few portions to enjoy this winter. I prepared the soup with green onions from my Sainte-Anne shallots planted at the beginning of September, with frozen leeks, potatoes from the cold room—I have some left to use up until the new ones—and fresh asparagus from the garden. I am always proud when I manage to prepare a dish of this quality made almost exclusively with raw materials that I have grown.

Cream of asparagus soup (8 to 10 servings)

Ingredients

• 30 plump asparagus spears
• 3 onions or 10 large green onions
• 2 leeks or 375 ml of sliced ​​leeks
• 2 potatoes
• 2 liters of broth (preferably vegetable)
• Olive oil for sweating the vegetables
• Salt to taste
• Olive oil for searing the asparagus heads
• A drizzle of vegetable cream to garnish

Preparation

First, trim the asparagus stems, then cut them into 3- to 4-cm segments. Set the heads aside for garnish. Slice the leeks and onions and sweat them with the asparagus segments in a pot with olive oil. Peel the potatoes and cut them into cubes. Add the broth and potato cubes to the vegetables in the pot and simmer for an hour. After simmering for an hour, let them cool, then transfer to a blender or Vitamix. You can pass them through a strainer or a chinois for a silky, fiber-free texture. Thirty minutes before serving, reheat the soup over low heat and add salt to taste. Five minutes before serving, in a skillet, grill the asparagus heads in very hot olive oil until tender. Add a little salt. When serving, place the asparagus heads as a garnish on the soup and top with a generous drizzle of vegetable cream.

Variants

To truly call this soup creamy, five minutes before serving, you can add 125 ml or more of vegetable or animal cream. To bring out the flavor of the asparagus, I recommend no additional seasoning. You can garnish with a knob of butter or sear the asparagus heads in butter, but in this case, over a lower heat. You can combine the asparagus heads with two chopped garlic scapes. A squeeze of lemon juice accentuates the acidity of the soup, which is already well-defined due to the asparagus's asparagine.

Yves Gagnon, cook and seed merchant.