Lebanese-inspired Chickpea & Lentil Soup.
A warming, hearty bowlful perfect for welcoming soup season!
It’s soup season, so obviously every single lunchtime I want to curl up with a big steaming bowl of something slowly simmered and nourishing. Happily, today I’ve got a brand new, super healthy but even more delicious soup recipe that ticks all those soup season boxes, all the while not requiring anything fancier than a dollop of good yogurt and a scattering of herbs to really make it sing.
Some of my favourite soup recipes I’ve published here on ingredient so far:
After a small yet hearty bowlful I ate in a cafeteria last month, there was only one option for the first soup I was going to focus on this soup season.
Recently, temporarily to help a friend I’ve been slipping in and out of my old life, visiting the building my office used to exist in, and most importantly for me, revisiting the cafeteria which, I’m happy to find still does excellent food. On my first day back it welcomed me with my favourite plateful of Jerk pork with beans, rice and an excellent creamy sauce that tasted exactly as I remembered, and I’ve also discovered that their hearty breakfast wraps (sausage, bacon and black pudding) are now a lot more filling than they used to be when I was a twenty-something nursing a hangover. To my immediate heartbreak, you’re no longer allowed to add a hash brown to one of these.
It was after one of these colossal wraps, still not hungry at lunchtime but knowing I’d need something to see me towards dinner that I wandered towards the soup section, not something I remember eating much of when I’d not had time to pack my own lunch. The soup of the day was ‘Lebanese Chickpea and Lentil’ and my modest (£1.15) bowlful was revelatory. There were no bold flavours or textures, nothing that screamed ‘look at me!’ Instead it was simple, soothing, and flavourful. A soup I could not get out of my head. A soup that fit ‘hug in a bowl’ cliche as the rain pounded down on the glass atrium roof above me.
So what made the soup ‘Lebanese’? Obviously there was something about the mild spicing in there, and also I noted as I got near the bottom of my bowl, just a hint of dried mint.
Further research led me to discover that the cafeteria soup had it’s roots in Shorbet Adas, red lentil soup popular in Lebanon and the Middle East in different iterations made simply with simmered red lentils, carrots, onions and cumin, often finished with a brightening splash of fresh lemon juice. The chickpeas it seems (unless a chef was working from a family recipe) were an addition to make a bowlful a more hearty lunchtime prospect, and I’ve kept them for that very reason in today’s recipe.
I know usually I focus on recipes that serve 1-2, being part of a couple irritated that many other recipe developers write recipes to serve at least 4-6 that are not easily halved (I even lost this fight with my publishers in One Pan Pescatarian and had to scale up a lot of the recipes), but this recipe happily serves 3-4 and is easily doubled, as this soup keeps so well in the fridge, and even develops in flavour the longer into the week you keep it. I also suspect that it will freeze well, and I’ll report back and update this post if this is indeed the case!
Lebanese-inspired Chickpea & Lentil Soup
Serves: 3-4, Preparation time: 10 minutes, Cooking time: 45 minutes
Such a simple soup, so use the best ingredients you can to really make things sing. Homemade stock if you have it, and proper local carrots rather than the mild, slightly watery ones from the supermarket. Make sure your dried herbs and spices are in date, and I know I’ve said this so many times before, if they’re easily available to you, jarred chickpeas rather than tinned.
1 tbsp light oil