This creamy butter bean soup with curly kale and lemon is both delicious and nutritious. Hearty and filling, it is quick and easy to make and freezes well.
🍴Why you will love this recipe
Butter beans are awesome, aren't they?! Cheap, tasty and packed with goodness (in the form of protein, fibre, vitamins and minerals), there's a good reason why you see them popping up in so many of my recipes.
In this soup, half the beans are blitzed to a velvety smooth purée whilst the other half are left whole to add a chunky texture. The finished soup is so deliciously creamy, you won't believe it doesn't contain half a tub of double cream!
Lemon juice is the perfect finishing touch - don't be tempted to skip it. It really lifts that 'beany' flavour to something so much more fresh, zingy and memorable!
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👩🏽🍳 How to make your Butter Bean Soup
For a full, printable recipe with ingredients and detailed instructions, scroll to the bottom of this page 👇🏼.
Trim and slice the leek and onion. Peel and crush the garlic cloves. Fry all for 3-4 minutes until soft.
Add one of the tins of butter beans (save the other for later), simmer with vegetable stock, then blitz to a very smooth purée.
Add the second tin of butter beans and simmer for a further 5 minutes. Add curly kale, parsley and lemon juice. Taste, adjust seasoning and serve.
🔪 Top Tips & FAQs
Keep blitzing the soup at step 4 until it is velvety-smooth. It can be tempting to stop after 10 seconds when it is just puréed, but the texture will be so much better if you keep going for a minute or two.
For a totally smooth soup, just blitz the whole lot together at the end.
If you don't have butter beans handy, this is just as good made with cannellini beans instead.
Yes, this soup freezes really well and is ideal for batch-cooking for the freezer in individual portions. You can defrost a portion in the microwave or a saucepan. Adjust the consistency of the soup after defrosting - you may need to add a little more water, and check seasoning before serving.
The soup actually gets better after a day in the fridge allowing the flavours to mellow. It will keep for 3-4 days as long as it is in an airtight container in the fridge.
🍽 If you liked that...
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📖 Recipe
Butter Bean Soup with kale and lemon
Ingredients
- 1 leek
- 1 onion
- 2 cloves garlic
- 2 tablespoon olive oil
- 2 x 400g tins of butterbeans
- 50 g curly kale tough stalks removed
- 750 g vegetable stock
- handful fresh parsley
- ½ lemon
Instructions
- Trim and slice the leek and onion, and peel and crush the garlic cloves.
- Heat the oil in a large saucepan and gently fry the leek, onion and garlic for 3-4 minutes until soft.
- Drain and rinse just one of the tins of butterbeans and add to the pan, along with the vegetable stock. Season well with salt and black pepper. Bring to the boil and simmer for 5 minutes.
- Use a hand blender to blitz the soup to a thick, creamy consistency (this may take 1-2 minutes, keep going!).
- Drain and rinse the second tin of butterbeans and add it to the soup. Return to the heat and simmer for a further 5 minutes.
- Meanwhile, remove any tough stalks from the kale and finely chop the leaves. Finely chop the parsley.
- Stir the kale and parsley through the soup and add the lemon juice. Taste and adjust seasoning then serve.
Video
Notes
Nutrition
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Liz Dabbs says
Delicious butterbean kale and lemon soup, so creamy and satisfying and very quick to make, I will be making this again . Thank you Kate
Kat says
Delicious, easy to make and healthy! Thanks for the recipe