Potato Soup

• 2 lbYukon Gold potatoes · cut in 2cm chunks
• 2 tbspolive oil
• 1onion · chopped
• 1celery stalk · chopped
• 1leek · sliced
• 3garlic cloves · minced
• 1 tspfresh thyme
• 4 cupsvegetable stock
• 1/2 cupunsweetened plant milk
• 1/2lemon · juiced
• 2 tbspchives · chopped, to serve
• kosher salt · to taste
• black pepper · to taste

Method

1. 1

   Build a proper base with onion, celery, and leek

   Soften a chopped onion, a stick of celery, and a sliced leek in a little olive oil over medium heat until translucent and sweet, ten minutes or so, without letting them colour. This gentle base is where a potato soup gets its savour; skip it and blend potatoes into stock and you get wallpaper paste, not soup. Take your time and let the vegetables sweat and soften properly. The leek in particular brings a mellow sweetness that makes the soup taste like more than potato.

2. 2

   Bloom garlic and a little thyme in the fat

   Stir in minced garlic and a teaspoon of fresh or dried thyme and cook for another minute until fragrant. Cooking the garlic briefly in the fat before any liquid goes in rounds off its raw edge and lets the thyme release its oils. These two carry most of the aromatic lift in a soup that is otherwise deliberately simple. Do not let the garlic brown or it turns bitter; you are just waking it up.

3. 3

   Cut the potatoes evenly so they cook at the same rate

   Peel the Yukon Golds if you like a smoother soup, or leave the skins on for more fibre and rustic texture, and cut them into even two-centimetre chunks. Even pieces are the difference between potatoes that are all cooked through at once and a pot where some are collapsing while others stay hard. Uniform chunks also blend cleanly later. This is dull knife work but it is the quiet key to a soup with consistent texture.

4. 4

   Add the potatoes and just enough stock to cover

   Tip in the potato chunks and pour in vegetable stock to barely cover them, no more. The instinct is to drown them, but too much liquid gives you thin, watery soup that no amount of blending will save, because the potatoes are what thicken it. You can always loosen a thick soup at the end with a splash more stock; you cannot easily rescue a watery one. Keep the liquid mean and let the starch do the work.

5. 5

   Simmer until the potatoes are truly soft

   Bring it to a gentle simmer, part-cover, and cook for fifteen to twenty minutes until a potato chunk crushes with no resistance against the side of the pot. Undercooked potato blends grainy and never goes silky, so give it the full time. A lazy simmer, not a hard boil, stops the pot from catching and keeps the texture even. When the potatoes surrender completely to a spoon, you are ready to blend.

6. 6

   Blend only half, and blend it gently

   Blend about half the soup, either by scooping some into a jug blender or with a stick blender pulsed in one part of the pot, then stir it back through. Blending half gives you a creamy, thick body with tender chunks still in it, which eats far better than a uniform puree. Just as important, blend gently and only briefly: over-working cooked potato whips out its starch and turns the soup gluey and gummy. A few short pulses is all it needs.

7. 7

   Finish for creaminess without cream

   Stir in a splash of unsweetened plant milk or a spoon of coconut milk for extra silkiness, then season hard with salt and a good grind of pepper, tasting as you go. The blended starch already makes it creamy, so the plant milk is a small lift rather than the whole thickener. Potato soup needs more salt than you expect to stop it tasting flat and floury, so season boldly and taste until it comes alive. A squeeze of lemon at the end brightens the whole pot.

8. 8

   Serve with something crisp on top

   Ladle it out and finish with a contrast in texture: crisp roasted chickpeas, toasted seeds, fried leek, or a scatter of chives and a thread of good olive oil. A smooth soup begs for something crunchy to eat against, or it reads as one-note. That topping is what turns a bowl of blended potato into a proper dish. Serve it hot with bread, and loosen any leftovers with stock when you reheat, since it thickens considerably as it stands.