Familiar from Old Testament legends, lentil beans for thousands of years have not lost either their taste or dietary qualities.
Lentil lentil soups are a must in the monastery menu, but for those who do not have such a serious austerity, there is also a recipe to taste.
Like all other legumes, lentils are in good harmony with spicy spices and vegetables, and the taste of garden herbs not only does not “clog” a specific lentil, but, on the contrary, young shoots of dill, cilantro, parsley, and onion perfectly decorate soups with their appearance and taste.
Lentil Lentil Soup - General Cooking Principles
• A regular lean lentil soup should not be greasy, and cooked in a post should not contain meat, fish, dairy products, and therefore such soups should be boiled in water or a vegetable broth.
• But in special cases: with a special diet or certain days of fasting, it is permissible to add vegetable oil in a slightly larger amount and it is possible to cook it with lean meat.
• Lentils in itself are rich in nutrients, but for greater satiety and nutrition, bulgur, couscous, chickpeas, mushrooms and all kinds of fresh vegetables are usually added to such soups, which saturate the lentil lentil soup with vitamins.
• Bulgur is boiled water treated, dried, and then crushed wheat grain, and couscous - semolina, produced on the basis of semolina. Such cereals can now be found on the shelves of almost any store.
• Lentil lentil soups are very nutritious, despite the complete absence of animal proteins and fats, and cooking them is easy and simple.
• Lentils do not require long cooking, and each type has its own taste. So, green beans of a bean culture have a mushroom aroma and boil for no more than 25 minutes, brown, spicy aroma and delicate nutty taste are cooked for no more than half an hour, and “red”, red, with a special sweet taste, should be cooked for no more than a quarter of an hour.
• Depending on the type of cereal chosen, the order of laying food in boiling vegetable broth or purified water is observed.
• The soup is left in its usual form or crushed with a blender, resulting in a lean lentil soup puree.
• For the greatest saturation of lean lentil soup with vitamins in it in large quantities at the end of cooking or when spilling on plates add greens.
Lentil soup with bulgur
Ingredients:
• 500 grams of ripe tomatoes;
• one pepper of green sweet pepper;
• 50 ml of vegetable oil;
• head of a bitter onion;
• 100 gr. brown lentils;
• 100 gr. coarse bulgur;
• dried mint - a little more than a teaspoon;
• small table salt;
• ground pepper, black.
Cooking method:
1. Wash the tomatoes and dip in boiling water for half a minute, peel, and chop the pulp with a blender or grind through a fine colander.
2. Half the sweet pepper along, remove the stem, remove the core with seeds, and cut the juicy pulp into cubes. Remove the husk from the onion and chop it smaller with a knife.
3. In a deep saucepan, warm the vegetable oil and lightly brown the onion in it. Add the pulp of sweet pepper, continue to fry.
4. After six minutes, put mashed potatoes prepared from tomatoes in a saucepan for vegetables and simmer with little heat, under the lid for seven minutes.
5. Add bulgur and red lentils, sorted, washed and slightly dried on a sieve, pour from one and a half to two liters of filtered cold water, quickly bring to a boil. Reduce heat and continue cooking soup for fifteen minutes, allowing only a slight boil.
6. Dip dried mint in the soup, add salt, add pepper to your taste and simmer for eight minutes over the smallest fire.
Lentil Tomato Soup with Couscous
Ingredients:
• 750 grams of fleshy tomato;
• one onion;
• four small cloves of garlic;
• a small pod of red chili pepper;
• sweet yellow pepper - 1 pc.;
• 100 grams of lentils;
• 100 grams of couscous, dried packaged;
• high-quality olive oil - 2 tablespoons;
• 1 tsp cumin (zira);
• a large bunch of garden parsley.
Cooking method:
1. In well-warmed olive oil, fry the finely chopped garlic, onions, and peeled and chopped Chili until browned.
2. Grind peeled tomatoes in a meat grinder or blender and add to the pan to the fried vegetables, cover loosely and simmer for ten minutes.
3. Transfer the stewed vegetables to a pot of boiling water (at least 2.5 liters), boil and cook for five minutes.
4. Put the vegetables in the broth, thoroughly washed couscous and lentils, season with zira, cook soup for another twenty minutes. Pepper to your taste with black pepper, add salt.
5. Cut chopped parsley, without stems. Pour the lentil tomato soup into the plates, add the greens.
Lentil Lentil Thick Soup
Ingredients:
• two peppers of sweet pepper, red and yellow;
• 200 grams of lentils;
• a small bitter onion;
• carrots - 1 pc.;
• ripe meaty tomatoes - 2 pcs.;
• a small clove of garlic;
• 2 tbsp. l curly (chopped) parsley;
• Extra salt, hand-ground black pepper, to taste;
• ground paprika - one tablespoon.
Cooking method:
1. Cut the carrots into slices, thinly, onion into large pieces, at the sweet pepper remove the core with seeds, and chop the flesh with a thin straw. Peel the peeled and finely chopped tomatoes blanched in boiling water.
2. Bring to a boil two liters of purified water, put carrots, onions, peppers and cook for twenty minutes at the lowest possible heat.
3. Add lentils washed in cold water under a tap, transfer to a pan with vegetables and continue cooking for forty minutes.
4. Dip the chopped tomatoes into the pan, add the paprika and, after boiling for 5 minutes, pour the almost ready soup into the blender bowl. Add a clove of garlic and mashed everything.
5. Season to your taste with salt, pepper, pour into the same pan and warm for a minimum of a couple of minutes.
6. Finely chopped greens are added to the plates when serving.
Lentil soup with mushrooms and vegetables
Ingredients for two liters of liquid (water):
• a pound of frozen mushrooms, any;
• one pepper of sweet pepper, red;
• a small celery root;
• carrot, medium size;
• onion;
• two tomatoes, fresh;
• lentils - 100 grams;
• 300 grams of boiled potatoes;
• one tablespoon of finely chopped fresh herbs;
• five peas of fresh pepper, black;
• Lavrushka - one small leaf.
Cooking method:
1. Thawed mushrooms previously in air, not in water, dip in boiling water and boil for half an hour from boiling.
2. Rinse all the vegetables well, half the sweet pepper along, remove the seeds with the stalk and cut into small strips. Chop celery, carrots and onions into small strips.
3. Fry all prepared vegetables with a minimum amount of vegetable oil for five minutes, add the diced tomato cubes, and continue to fry for another three minutes.
4. In the broth with mushrooms, dip the thoroughly washed and slightly dried lentils, and after seven minutes add the chopped potatoes.
5. When the potatoes are cooked until half cooked, transfer the fried vegetables from the pan to the pot with soup, add peas, lavrushka, add salt and cook a little, checking the readiness for potatoes.
6. Sprinkle greens with lentil soup, cover and simmer for another two minutes at the very minimum heat.
Spicy Lentil Soup with Chickpeas
Ingredients for four servings (900 ml of water):
• 200 grams of dry chickpea;
• 150 grams of lentils, preferably red;
• fresh ripe tomatoes - 400 grams;
• dry cumin, good quality - 1.5 tsp;
• half a teaspoon of "Chile", dry, ground;
• sweet salad onion;
• a small handful of fresh (finely chopped) cilantro or any other greenery.
Cooking method:
1. In a saucepan, best with a double, thick bottom, with very little heat, warm the caraway seeds with ground Chili for no more than two minutes. Pour in vegetable oil and fry chopped red onion in it for five minutes. During the frying process, periodically mix the onion with spices so that the frying does not stick to the bottom, and the onion is well fried on all sides to a delicate golden color.
2. Add the lentils, well-washed, well-dried, slightly dried in a colander, sliced tomatoes into small pieces, pour in all the liquid and bring the contents of the pan to a boil.
3. Reduce the heating level so that the soup does not boil strongly, and continue to cook for a quarter of an hour, then grind the soup with mashed blender.
4. Add pre-soaked overnight, then boiled chickpeas until cooked and cook soup for five minutes. Salt with shallow salt.
5. Pour finely chopped cilantro or other herbs and remove the finished soup from the heat.
Lentil Lentil Soup - Tips and Tricks
• It is possible to exclude the fat content in the soup if the vegetables are not spassed, but simply boiled along with the rest of the ingredients. The taste of the soup itself will not suffer, and dietary properties will increase.
• If the lentils are poured with cold water and allowed to stand for half an hour, it will cook much faster.
• It is recommended to salt the lentil soups at the end of cooking, so that the bean seed cooks better and faster.
• Lentil lentil soup will be much more satisfying if cooked on lean types of meat or fish. For cooking lean soups, they usually take lean veal, white chicken or sea fish fillets, river fish are fatter and not all types are suitable for lean soup.
• The type of lentil is best chosen according to the type of soup being prepared. Green lentils are best for mushroom soups, brown grains are recommended in spicy soups, and red is preferable in vegetable soups.
