Cheesy broccoli beer soup with smoky sunflower chorizo

June 24, 2016

Cindy bought me a copy of the Cinnamon Snail cookbook for my birthday (and whipped up an amazing meal from it while we were in Stockholm), and I wanted to take it for a test drive before she jetted off to the US. Melbourne was turning on typically soup-friendly weather, and this broccoli/beer soup seemed like something I could tackle on a Friday night. 

It came together really easily - you can cook the soup while the 'chorizo' is cooking. The sunflower seed chorizo is worth the effort too, smoky and spicy with a little bit of crunch. This recipe made way more than we needed, but I enjoyed the soup so much that I made a second batch straight afterwards to use it up. The soup itself come out nice and thick thanks to all of the blended up potatoes - it's part soup/part mashed potato, with the nooch adding some cheesiness. Ours didn't come out the kind of vibrant green that was pictured in the book - the broccoli colour was swamped by the beer and tamari, so we got more of a khaki. 

This is a solid winter dish - it'll slot into our regular soup rotation for sure. 

Cheesy broccoli beer soup with smoky sunflower chorizo

(adapted from a recipe in Adam Sobel's Street Vegan)

Sunflower chorizo

1.5 cups sunflower seeds

2 tablespoons tomato paste

2 tablespoons Cajun seasoning (we found some in Woolies)

2 teaspoons ground cumin

2 tablespoons tamari

2 tablespoons maple syrup

1.5 teaspoons liquid smoke

1/4 cup olive oil

2 teaspoons fennel seeds

Soup

3 tablespoons peanut oil

2 shallots, roughly chopped

3 garlic cloves, roughly chopped

1 celery stalk, chopped

2 tablespoons Dijon mustard

1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper (don't be heavy-handed with this, the cayenne really packs a punch)

1 tablespoon smoked paprika

2 tablespoons tamari

1 head of broccoli, roughly chopped

1 stubby beer

2 cups Massel 'chicken' stock

3 small potatoes (the recipe specifies Yukon golds, we used Pontiacs I think)

1/2 cup nutritional yeast

The first step is to make the chorizo. 

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees and line a baking tray with baking paper sprayed with oil.

Combine all the ingredients in a food processor and pulse for about a minute - you want to combine everything and break the seeds up a bit, but you don't want it to grind to powder or anything.

Crumble the mixture over the baking tray and bake for 15-20 minutes, until just before it starts to burn - if you've spread the mixture out it should go a bit crispy.

Then, onto the soup.

Heat the oil in a big pot and saute the shallots, garlic and celery for about 4 minutes. 

Throw in the mustard, cayenne, paprika and tamari and stir-fry everything for another couple of minutes. 

Stir in the stock, beer, broccoli, nooch and potatoes. Cover the pot and bring the mix to the boil, cooking until the potato chunks are soft (about 15 minutes for us).

Allow the mix to cool a bit to lower the burn-risk and then blend everything up with an immersion blender. 

Serve, topped with a generous sprinkling of the chorizo.