Black Bean Soup with Cumin and Cilantro

Now, finally, something about soup! Soup can almost be considered the perfect food, if such a notion were possible. Many soup recipes require only a handful of ingredients, little in the way of specialty cooking equipment, and minimal time requirement. Most soups can be frozen for later enjoyment. Soup hydrates you. I could go on, but its time to get to it.

A couple of postings back I detailed my successful efforts to soak/simmer dried black beans for this soup recipe, from Epicurious.com:

Black Bean Soup with Cumin and Cilantro

Bon Appétit | February 2000

I already had most of the ingredients, and all I had to pick up was some cumin, cilantro, onions and garlic. Since this was my first go at this recipe I decided to hew closely to the recipe, and not to proportionately increase the yield.

One word about the stock I generally use. I should be making stock from scratch, and this year I do intend to use homemade as much as I can. If I don't have fresh stock at hand I use Better Than Bouillon brand soup stock paste. It has considerably less sodium (and much better taste) than cube or powder bouillon.

If you have a look at the recipe you will see it calls for 8 cups of vegetable stock, which equals about 1.9 L. so I rounded up to 2 L. of prepared stock. I used Better Than Bouillon turkey base, and my usual measure is one tablespoon per L. I obviously had pre-soaked and simmered my black beans beforehand, and did not cook them unprepared in the stock as the recipe instructs. After simmering for about an hour and a half I pureed the soup with an immersion blender. I am enjoying a bowl as I write this blog, and I can tell you that the soup is quite good, not terribly spicy, and that I will definitely make it again. And likely up the jalapeno measure to 1/3 of a cup. Oh one last thing: I omitted the lime wedges as garnish only because I forgot to pick up some fresh limes. A generous scoop of sour cream would also be a good idea for a garnish in this instance.