Chervil soup

Prepare this easy chervil soup recipe so you will enjoy a delicious soup with only a few ingredients and little work: enjoy the taste and little dishes afterwards.

This makes a delicious and filling soup for spring, when the herb is available in abundance. Taste even better and will be more filling when you add meatballs to the soup (or simply add a fried – leftover – sausage that you cut into pieces).

When you don’t have chervil, use cress: of course the taste will be completely different, but equally delicious.

For the "cream", we use cashew nuts, because they need the least amount of time to soak (you know how it goes when you start cooking and a recipe calls for "soak nuts overnight". Cashews make due with 1 hour of soaking, so meanwhile you will have 1 hour to prepare all your other dishes.

What is chervil?

Chervil is a small herb and used to be one of the earliest "spring vegetables". We used to harvest a big, big bunch and used it to transform a basic vegetable stock into a delicious, pureed chervil soup.

Chervil is family if parsley and looks like a very tiny, frail version of Italian parsley.

It’s available in your local farmers market or you can grow it yourself (even in a flowerpot).

Chervil soup ingredients

• 300 grams (10 oz) chervil (3 to 4 bunches): the more the merrier
• 50 ml olive oil
• 2 liters (4 pints) chicken stock
• at least 30 gram (1 oz) of raw cashew nuts
• 100 ml (about 3 oz) water
• 1 egg yolk
• 1/2 teaspoon rocksalt or seasalt
• pepper to taste

How to make chervil soup

 

1. Wash and chop the chervil.
2. Heat the oil in a large soup-pot and add the chervil. Stir and simmer over medium heat.
3. Add the stock and bring to the boil.
4. Simmer on a medium fire for at least 20 minutes.
5. When your soup has simmered enough, add the cashewmilk and puree all with an immersion blender. Again: mix long so all is pureed well.
6. With a fork, stir the eggyolk through your cashewmilk. Add this mixture to the soup and puree again with the immersion blender.
7. Taste your creamy chervil soup and add pepper and salt to taste.