Recipe: Vegan Mulligatawny 9 February 2007 10:06 am
Posted by Tracy in : America's Test Kitchen,coconut,cooking,recipes,soup,vegan,vegetarian , trackbackThis soup is a vegan adaptation of a recipe I saw a few months ago on an episode of America’s Test Kitchen called “A Passage to India.” According to ATK‘s official site, the episode originally aired two seasons ago (Season 5), which makes me wonder why my friendly local public television station is so slow to air stuff and whether I should give in and subscribe to the service that lets me watch ATK online already. But I digress.
I had never heard of Mulligatawny soup before watching “A Passage to India,” but according to Chris Kimball’s “here’s what can go wrong and what we’re trying to correct” introduction for the recipe, it’s a curried vegetable soup that made its way to the U.S. by way of the English, who of course had colonies in both North America and the Indian subcontinent. Wikipedia confirms that the name Mulligatawny comes from the Tamil for “pepper water,” so one of ATK‘s goals for the recipe was to spice it up. I’m happy to say they succeeded, and what’s more the soup is warming without being super-heavy, so I think it would be good in the summer, when spicy food can be refreshing if it’s not too filling. Although Anglicized (and Americanized) versions of curries are often thick stews, according to Reay Tannahill’s Food in History the original curries were more like soups or sauces used to flavor rice, and this soup is excellent in that role as well, though obviously more filling once you get all that starch involved.
What You Need (Ingredients and Equipment)
- soup pot
- blender
- 6 medium cloves garlic, 3 whole, 3 minced or pressed
- 2 inches ginger, peeled and grated (~2 TB)
- 1/4 cup water
- 3 TB vegetable oil or butter if you aren’t vegan
- 2 medium onions, chopped
- 1 TB tomato paste (can be omitted but it does deepen the flavor)
- 1/2 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
- 1 1/2 TB curry powder
- 1 tsp ground cumin
- 1/4 tsp cayenne
- 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
- 7 cups vegetable stock
- 2 medium carrots, chopped
- 1 medium rib celery, chopped
- 1 medium banana, peeled
- salt and pepper
- fresh cilantro (optional garnish)
- yogurt (optional nonvegan garnish)
What You Do
- Heat the oil in your soup pot or Dutch oven. Add the onions (and tomato paste, if you’re using it) and cook over medium heat until the onions are soft and starting to brown, 5-10 minutes.
- Add the coconut and cook about 1 minute, until you can smell it. Mmmm, coconut.
- Lower the heat, add the minced garlic, half the ginger, flour, and spices; stir until combined. (I usually end up with a lot of stuff stuck to the bottom of the pan at this point because I didn’t turn the heat down enough, so be careful.)
- Gradually add the stock, stirring well and scraping the bottom of the pan as needed.
- Add the chopped vegetables and banana to the pot; bring soup to a boil. Lower the heat and cook until the veggies are done, about 20 minutes.
- Meanwhile, purée the remaining raw garlic and ginger in the blender with the 1/4 cup of water, until smooth. When the soup vegetables are tender, blend the soup with the garlic-ginger purée (spicy! yum!), in batches as necessary, and return it to the pot for gentle reheating if needed (a new soup pot is the easiest way to do this, but it does mean more dishes). Season the soup to taste with salt and lots of fresh-ground black pepper; serve garnished with yogurt and fresh cilantro.
Makes about 4-6 servings of soup (more if served on rice) in about half an hour. The longer you blend it, the smoother and creamier it gets. Don’t worry about having lots of leftovers; they reheat very well. Yum!
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