Enrich Your Pureed Vegetable Soups With Tahini

Soup is good. It’s warm and comforting and easy to eat, equally at home at the beginning of a hearty meal or as the star of a light lunch. It’s also a great way to use up a ton of vegetables. Whether you have a bunch of carrots that are about to go weird, a forgotten squash, or a wilted bag of spinach, you can whir the produce into some broth (with some aromatics) and make a pretty good soup out of them. Add tahini, and you have an amazing soup.

I must admit that adding tahini to pureed soups is not my original idea. I got the notion from Samin Nostrat’s Spinach & Cilantro Soup with Tahini & Lemon (a very good soup). Nosrat uses the tahini to give the soup body and flavor without overwhelming its more vivid qualities. You should make this soup, but you should also add tahini to every single one of the creamy, pureed vegetable soups you make from here on out.

I added some to my Instant Pot carrot soup, and I will be doing so again. The tahini didn’t overpower or obscure the carrots or garlic, it just made everything better. Adding tahini gives you a slight nuttiness, a much creamier body, and a deeper, kind of roasted flavor. I used a quarter cup for half a batch of the carrot soup, but you can add more or less to suite your tastes—just blend or vigorously whisk it in at the last moment.

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Beyond homemade soups, adding tahini is a great way to give insipid store-bought soups a little more oomph, especially if you want to increase the creaminess without adding dairy (or making your soup taste like coconut). Just heat your soup how you normally would, whisking in well-stirred tahini to taste, a tablespoon at a time. I think you’ll be impressed, provided you are the type of person who can be impressed by soup.