Festive Menu 2025: Starter

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The soup, that starts the festive season: Big Tree Soup (Rcp# 80)

Ingredients for ‘Big Tree Soup’

  • 20g broken walnut kernels (roughly 2 tablespoons)
  • 100g precooked, edible chestnuts (equals 11-12 whole, peeled marrons; break and then remove any hard residue)
  • 100g chopped fennel bulb (small pieces, like chopped onion; equals about 5 tablespoonfuls)
  • 1 spring onion
  • 2 tablespoons (sun-)dried and salted tomatoes (about 55-60g)
  • 1 stalk of lemongrass (or 1 tablespoon dried lemon balm/ 10-12 fresh lemon balm leaves)
  • 1 medium ginger toe (sliced)
  • ½ teaspoon smoked sea salt
  • 1 knife tip bear’s garlic in oil (about 1/8 teaspoon)
  • 1 tablespoon almond butter (always stir almond butter, before taking it out of the jar)
  • 1 knife tip of ground cinnamon
  • 1 knife tip of ground caraway
  • Freshly ground nutmeg
  • ½ teaspoon of lime juice
  • 10-12 fresh basil leaves (or ½ teaspoon dried/frozen)
  • 2 teaspoons chopped chives (fresh or frozen)
  • 2 teaspoons parsley (fresh or frozen)
  • 75g smoked tofu
  • canola oil for roasting
  • You will also need:
    • a pot that holds at least 2 liters and has a bottom plate, which works good for roasting (the ability to keep heat is a good indicator for that)
    • a wand blender

Cooking Instructions for ‘Big Tree Soup’

  1. Roast the walnuts with 2 tablespoons of canola oil in the pot, together with fennel pieces, ginger slices, lemon grass, and green from spring onion. Keep temperature low. When the nuts are starting to brown (distinct roasted smell), add salted the tomatoes. Carefully sauté them with the rest (will burn easily!) until you get a faint tomato smell, then turn down to low.
  2. Add 1 liter of very hot water (from electric kettle, mind the temperature difference of water and warmed ingredients in hot pan!). Stir, then bring to a brief boil. Add mashed pre-cooked chestnuts, chopped white from spring onion, and almond butter, then turn down and let simmer on low heat for 8-10 minutes until the soup starts to get creamy.
  3. Turn off the heat and remove ginger and lemongrass with a fork (careful, hot).
  4. Add lime juice, basil, smoked sea salt, cinnamon, caraway, and nutmeg. Also, add lemon balm here, if you did not use lemon grass before. After stirring carefully, let rest for 5 minutes, then blend with a wand blender.
  5. Mix chopped chives, parsley, and cubes of roasted tofu, and add in spoonfuls to the soup plates before serving.

Serving Tips:

If you blend the soup before serving, you get a cream on top that looks a little like the crema on top of a fresh espresso.

Other Options:
You can prepare the soup a day ahead of time. If you do, complete step 3 (remove the ginger and lemongrass), but only roughly blend the soup after letting it rest for five minutes. Let it cool completely, then store it in an airtight container in the refrigerator. The next day, carefully and slowly reheat the soup for about 15 minutes before serving. Bring it to a very brief boil (no more than 3 minutes), stirring constantly. Then, turn off the heat, add the spices, salt, basil, and lime juice, and let it cool to just above eating temperature. Also, add about 150 ml of broth because the liquid will have thickened. Meanwhile, mix the herbs and tofu cubes from step 5. Finally, blend the soup completely to make the crema and add the tofu-herb mixture before serving.

Please note: For all my recipes (text) on this blog (By MagS, Parsley-Lane Blog) I grant a CC license under the terms of BY-NC-SA 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike). For further explanations, please see the Legal Notice or visit creativecommons.org.