Hi!
The summer is here. And slowly the season of cucumber is beginning. Cucumber is one of my favourite summer veggies and cold cucumber soup is my go to soup when I want something refreshing for lunch or dinner. It is a great cool down option that can be edited to your liking. You can use onion or garlic, and fresh herbs of your liking are more then welcome. The only catch with this soup is that it needs the time to rest. This is a raw vegetable soup. You don’t cook it. Therefore it needs time to develop and merge the flavours. And you can’t speed it up.
Needed for cucumber soup
1 large cucumber (salad ones work great)
1/2 small clove of garlic, grated (optionally 1/2 small onion grated)
500 mL yogurt
water
fresh dill or herbs of your choice
salt, pepper (white if you don’t want specks of pepper in soup)
Peel the cucumber and cut it into chunks. If your cucumber has a lot of seeds then take out the seeds. If you leave the seeds then you may need less water, but depending on the cucumber it may turn a bit bitter. Salt the cucumber and put it in a container with a lid. Try it to see if it’s bitter. If there is no bitterness then combine it with the garlic and marinate it for at least two hours.
After two hours take the cucumber out and remove it from the liquid. Add it to blender, add half of yogurt, herbs and little bit of water, and garlic if you didn’t use it to marinate the cucumbers. Blend it until smooth. Adjust the seasoning a bit with salt and pepper and put it back in the fridge for at least 3 more hours. Then take it out and again blend the hell out of it. If you want it extra smooth then pass it (i mean press it) through the sieve. Then put it back in the fridge for final cooling. Now if you have one of those fancy extractors, use that, you don’t have to blend it so much then, and you should get a smooth soup without need for a sieve. I still suggest you periodically re-blend it, but with extractors or strong blenders one blend may be all you need.
Leave the soup again for at least an hour in the fridge, then take it out and blend in the rest of the yogurt, tasting after every two spoons to see if the soup is to your liking. When the soup tastes good stop adding yogurt and either chill it a bit more or add cubes of ice and serve. To garnish the soup you can use edible flowers like chive or borage flowers.
Simple modifications
This soup is usually green-white or white-green in colour. But you can make it fully white, by choosing cucumber with whiter flesh and completely getting rid of the skin. You can also make it green by not peeling the cucumbers. You can make it from big salad cucumbers or you can use small cucumbers. I haven’t yet tried it with lemon cucumbers variety, but that can also be very good.
Vegan version
To make this soup vegan you would have to use a good neutral vegan yogurt. The main tastes of this soup are cucumber, onion/garlic, salt and acid. So if the vegan yogurt doesn’t have enough acid, please squeeze a couple of lemon drops to the soup. I wouldn’t suggest using coconut yogurt.
Enjoy!