Do you love to cook soup? If so, you might be a genius, at least according to someone who should know. Abraham Maslow, architect of the famous “ Hierarchy of Needs ,” once said that “a first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.” And vegan soups get to be especially creative, as we experiment and discover how to swap out meat stocks and creams — and to add plant-based texture, flavor, and creamy yumminess to the soups we make.
Soups are delicious any time of year, but many of them have a special place in our hearts when it’s cold out. Something about the steam rising from our place settings, the way our hands can cradle a bowl or cup, and the chunky, grounding root vegetables that often appear in winter soups. They all combine to warm us up, body and soul.
And some tasty soups can also serve to cool us down in the summer thanks to spicy ingredients that open up our pores and encourage sweating.
Not all soups are served hot, of course. Gazpacho and borscht are two famous examples of soups served cold. Sometimes a cold soup is as simple as blending ripe fruit with some water and adding spices and chunks of other stuff. Nothing is more refreshing on a hot summer day than, say, a chilled watermelon soup. You can even save on washing up by using the rind as a serving dish.
Whether you’re a dedicated vegan, curious, or just someone who likes to explore new tastes and cuisines, you can find much to love from vegan soups.
Here we’ve rounded up all of our favorite vegan soup recipes: with an eye towards recipes that are healthy and easy (since that’s what we’re most often asked for). Take a look through our favorites and let us know: which would you try? We’d love to know.
16 Delicious Vegan Soup Recipes
Thai Curry Butternut Soup
Delicious, comforting, and bursting with flavor, this soup will leave you wanting more! Not only is it simple to make, but it’s also packed with nutrition from the onion, garlic, ginger, and butternut squash. Enjoy it during the fall and winter when butternut squash is at its nutritional peak.
Orange Lentil Soup with Anise and Coriander
Coriander and star anise, the stars of this soup, are infused in a tea ball to create beautiful flavors and aromas. The soup has the lingering essence of these enchanting spices, and the tea ball can be left in or removed earlier in the cooking, depending on how much flavor you’d like to impart. Herbs and spices are often heroes in the nutrition world and this soup is no exception.
Creamy Vegan Broccoli Soup
Here’s a vegan broccoli soup that will become an instant favorite. It’s impossibly creamy, whole food plant based ( WFPB ), and it tastes like the coziest bowl of comfort. This easy and healthy soup is vegan and gluten-free, so it works for a variety of diets. It tastes like that cozy and comforting broccoli cheese soup from a can…but 1000 times better!
Classic Bean Soup
Here’s a cozy bowl that’s so hearty and satisfying, you’ll never want to put your spoon down. Try this Smoky Bean Soup! Make room in your heart for this recipe, because this one dazzles . Kidney beans and navy beans float in a savory, smoky broth of fire roasted tomatoes that has just the right glossy texture. It uses canned beans, but it tastes like it’s been simmering all day. Each silky, smoky spoonful is a bit of heaven.
Curry Lentil Soup
Next up in our vegan soup recipes…this stunner of a vibrant bowl. After one bite, we guarantee you’ll be sold on this curry lentil soup. It’s full of hearty red lentils and root vegetables, and the broth is swirled with red curry paste and coconut milk. With all the texture and flavor going on, it feels rich and luxurious. But at the same time it’s a healthy, plant based meal !
Creamy Vegan Potato Soup
This vegan soup recipe is so full of flavor and impossibly dreamy that you’d swear it had cream or milk in it. Turns out, it’s easy to make a potato soup without dairy that’s the equivalent of wearing a cozy sweater next to a roaring fire. There’s no blender needed: this soup is beautifully chunky and flavored with savory Old Bay. Load it up with toppings and it’s a stunner.
Cauliflower Soup with Moroccan Spices
One of our top rated vegan soup recipes is this Moroccan cauliflower soup! The cauliflower is roasted until lightly charred in a very hot oven. Then it’s blended with onion, carrot and warm Moroccan spices into a silky puree. Think: cumin, coriander, turmeric, ginger, and cinnamon. This soup is pretty simple to put together, full of nutrients, and vegan and gluten-free too.
Easy Kale Soup
Need a healthy vegan soup recipe that pleases everyone? Try this Kale Soup with White Beans! Hearty Tuscan kale, white beans and kale float in a tangy broth flavored with oregano and fennel. It’s like a combination of all our favorite soup recipes in one bowl: comforting and full of bold Mediterranean-style flavors.
Carrot Ginger Soup
Here’s a bright orange puree that that tastes like sunshine: Carrot Ginger Soup ! This recipe is ideal for when you’ve got a big bag of carrots to use up, or when you’re in the midst of a gray season craving sun. We often avoid pureed soups around here because they’re not filling enough to be a meal. But this vegan soup: this one’s worth taking time for!
Creamy Vegan Mushroom Soup
Baby bella mushrooms are perfect in pasta…and soup! What’s better than a steaming cup of mushroom soup to warm your insides? This one delivers with flavor: the umami of the mushrooms against the creamy broth is absolute magic.
Minestrone Soup
Minestrone soup is an Italian recipe designed for using up any veggies you had on hand. This classic soup is full of chunky vegetables, white beans, and pasta in a tomato-y broth. Serve it with basil pesto (or vegan pesto ) and it’s called Minestrone alla genovese . In Italian this means “minestrone soup from Genoa,” the capital of the region of Liguria Italy where all the great pesto comes from! Got an Instant Pot? Try Instant Pot Minestrone .
Ultimate Vegan Chili
This vegan chili is for you . Yep, this one is our best chili recipe yet and it’s totally plant based! It’s full of savory flavor starring beans, quinoa, and a hint of adobo sauce for complexity. Top it with our vegan sour cream and some pickled jalapenos and well: it’s out of this world good.
Vegan Corn Chowder
This one is our best ever corn chowder recipe, if we must say ourselves. It’s another fan favorite, where blending cashews with a bit of the soup makes you swear it’s loaded with dairy. This vegan chowder recipe turns out seriously creamy, with a savory, salty, and sweet flavor from simmering the corn cobs directly in the pot.
Vegan Tomato Basil Soup
What’s more classic than tomato basil soup? This one is oh so easy to make. Chop some veggies, simmer, then blend. All hail the tomato basil soup! It couldn’t be cozier; even more so accompanied by crusty bread. This version is a gluten free, dairy free and vegan soup recipe, so it fits many diets. Though of course you could add a dollop of cashew cream to make it a creamy soup too!
Vegan Coconut Curry Soup
This creamy, dreamy coconut curry soup recipe is not just mega delicious, swirled with coconut milk and spiced with curry powder, cumin, and coriander. It’s also a pantry soup! What’s a pantry soup? A recipe made only of ingredients found in your pantry. It’s also quick to whip up, healthy, and versatile for multiple diets: vegetarian, gluten-free, and vegan.
Tomato Sage Chickpea Soup
This tomato sage chickpea soup is savory, cozy and comforting…the classic antidote to a gray day. This vegan soup features sliced onions instead of the typical diced, which add a unique extra texture to the dish. The other stars are dried porcini mushrooms, which add a hefty umami to the dish, and fresh sage, which tastes like the culinary form of a hug. Alex’s opinion: “It has the vibe of canned soup, but tastes way better and healthier.”
The Benefits of Eating Plant-Based Soups
There are more good reasons to include veggie-based soups in your diet than you can shake a ladle at. Hot soups warm you up and give you that nice, cozy feeling. And many of us have happy childhood memories of a family member demonstrating their love for us through soup. Additional plant-based soups are good for:
1. Fighting the Common Cold
Especially when you’re sick, soups can be wonderful sources of nourishment. They’re a great way to get lots of nutrients when you don’t feel like eating all that much. All that water helps to hydrate you almost without your noticing. And the steam and heat can relieve sore throats and decongest clogged sinuses and nasal passages. Add a little grated ginger to the soup to boost its nose-clearing power.
2. Getting Your Veggies In
Soups are also a great way to get your veggies. For veggie-phobes, soup can be an elegant and tasty way to hide carrots, celery, onions, potatoes, beans, lentils, and whole grains. Many folks who “don’t like” vegetables, enjoy consuming them in this stealth manner.
3. Making Your Life Easier
You don’t have to be an amazing chef to make amazing soup. Soups are among the most flexible and forgiving of meals. Unlike baking a bread or a casserole, which you can’t really mess with once you’ve stuck it in the oven, you can keep tasting soup and adding ingredients until you get something you like. They’re easy to make and can be very filling without costing a lot of money.
4. Aiding Weight Loss
Soups can also be helpful with weight loss. Because of all their water content, they can fill you up without necessarily providing a lot of calories. Unlike smoothies, which are less filling than eating the smoothie ingredients whole and therefore can cause you to overconsume, soups are actually more filling than if you just ate the ingredients not in soup form. The critical factor appears to be the fact that soups are generally hot, and therefore, we take our time to eat them. That gives our bodies time to send “I’m full” signals to the brain before too much food has gone down the hatch.
5. Adding in Nutrients
Soups can be extremely high in nutrients, depending on what ingredients you add. Greens, veggies, herbs, and spices can pack a nutritional punch in quantities that would be hard to consume in their raw or simply cooked form.
6. Using Up Produce
Also, soup can be the last stop on the produce train for veggies that have, not to put too fine a point on it, seen better days. Humans have been stretching their produce through soup for millennia. (Soup, archeologists suspect, was invented at least 20,000 years ago, soon after the invention of waterproof and fireproof cookware. Unfortunately, it probably took a couple thousand more years to invent the spoon.)
Droopy carrots and celery, older potatoes, wrinkly bell peppers, and wilted greens can revive in soup like nothing was ever amiss. As Russ Cooper wrote in MAD magazine, “Soup is food’s last chance to be eaten.”
Give Us Our Daily Soup
Soup is one of the greatest gifts bequeathed to us by our ancestors, holding its own right up there with fire, stick figure drawing, and the phrase “Yabba Dabba Doo.” A good pot of soup is practically alchemical, transforming singular and ordinary ingredients into a new thing entirely. Soup has saved many items of produce from the compost or garbage bin and allows us to nourish our families and communities inexpensively and lavishly. And now that the modern era of plant-based innovation has blossomed, soups are being reinvented yet again to be healthier and more delicious than ever.
Leave a Reply