Tomato and White Bean Soup

Why You'll Love This Cozy Soup

This Tomato and White Bean Soup is sure to become a favorite for several reasons:

1. Nutritious and Delicious: This soup is packed with healthy ingredients like beans, tomatoes, and spinach, offering a balance of protein, fiber, and vitamins. But it’s not just good for you, it's also incredibly tasty!
2. Easy to Make: With simple ingredients and easy steps, this hot soup is very simple to whip up, even on a busy weeknight.
3. Comforting: There’s something inherently comforting about a warm bowl of soup. This one, together with filling Minestrone, is our top one-pot meal when it comes to comfort food.
4. Great for Meal Prep: This soup is a fantastic option for meal prep. It keeps well in the fridge, and the flavors only get better with time!

Our Tomato and Bean Soup is:

• Vegan
• Gluten-free
• Healthy
• Protein-rich
• Perfect for cold weather
• A one-pot meal
• Easy to prepare
• Quick to make
• Family-friendly

How to make this Tomato and White Bean Soup

Ingredients

White beans. For this recipe, we use Cannellini beans. You can use other types of beans such as navy beans, lime, or butter beans. If you are using dry beans, you'll need to soak them overnight and cook them before adding them to the soup. For simplicity, we use canned beans. You can also use black beans or kidney beans, like we do when we make this fantastic Lubya recipe.

Fresh or tinned tomatoes. We make this recipe very often during winter, and we don't get juicy tomatoes that easily during the colder months. Using good quality canned tomatoes, tomato passata, or tomato sauce, is a great way to ensure your tomato recipes taste fantastic, even during winter. Another little trick is to use cherry tomatoes, which tend to be sweeter. Of course, if you have access to ripe and sweet fresh tomatoes, make the most of them! If you want to enhance the natural flavor of the tomatoes, you can add some tomato paste.

Leek. We use leek to flavor the base of the soup. You can use white or yellow onion, but leek adds a very nice and sweet flavor.

Garlic.

Vegetable Broth. You can use homemade vegetable stock or store-bought stock.

Spinach. Fresh or frozen spinach are both good options for this soup. Alternatively, you can use baby spinach or chard.

Dried herbs. To add some extra flavor to this great soup, we use dried oregano and basil. You can use other dried herbs such as thyme, parsley, or sage.

Spices. For this Tomato and Bean Soup Recipe, we use sweet smoked paprika and cumin.

Harissa (optional). To make the spicy version of this soup, we use Harissa paste. Alternatively, you can add red pepper flakes.

Step-by-Step Method

1. In a large pot, for this recipe, we use our dutch oven, heat some olive oil and sauté the leek, finely chopped, until it softens and begins to brown.
2. Next, add the dried herbs, minced garlic, cumin powder, and sweet paprika, and cook for 2-3 minutes.
3. Pour in the chopped canned tomatoes and simmer for approximately 8 minutes over medium heat.
4. Then, add the vegetable stock and cannellini beans.
5. Allow the mixture to simmer, then add the fresh or frozen spinach. Cook for an additional 2 minutes before turning off the heat.
6. Garnish with fresh parsley, a rosemary sprig, or basil, season to taste with a pinch of salt and black pepper, and serve with crusty bread. If you want to add some acidity, consider adding some lemon zest, or fresh lemon juice before serving.

Variations to our Tomato and White Bean Soup

• Add more protein. You can add more protein to this vegan soup by adding more pulses such as red lentils, or garbanzo beans, or adding pan-fried tofu cubes before serving.
• Make it spicy. We kept the original recipe mild, as it's a family recipe, but when we serve this tomato and bean soup, we always add Harissa Paste to our bowls. This one-pot meal tastes incredibly delicious with a teaspoon of Harissa if you like spicy food. You can as well, add the harissa paste while cooking the tomatoes
• Make the creamy version of this soup. Add some cashew cream right before serving. Stir and combine with the rest of the ingredients. Another option to make this a thicker soup is to blend half of the soup using an immersion blender and mix it back in with the rest of the soup. For our kids, we blend the soup, as they like it better than the chunky soup.