Roasted carrot soup is so common yet delicious. Today we are going to use only 3 ingredients in this easy recipe: coconut oil, onion and of course carrots.

When you don’t add many ingredients, the key is to bring out the true flavor of the produce. And I think roasting brings out the best flavor of carrots, because of “Maillard reaction” that happens during roasting.  This is the key in making this 3-ingredients carrot soup successful. “Maillard reaction”, also known as the browning process,  is basically a chemical reaction that happens at certain temperature, rearranging amino acids and certain simple sugars on food surface to create flavors and aromas. You maybe heard this a lot about cooking meat, but it can happen with any food, vegetables and breads included.

In the recipe below you will see me mentioning “scrap down the brown bits from the pan” many times. Because those brown bits are the result of Maillard reaction and full of flavors. That’s why we don’t use a separate roasting pan because we don’t want to lose all those precious brown bits. Of course the difficulty is to distinguish these Maillard reaction brown bits with burned bits. First, it’s very important to cut the carrots and onions into uniform pieces so they cook evenly. I really encourage you to use fresh whole carrots and peel and cut them yourself. In the rare occasion when I’m in a hurry I’ve used bagged baby carrots, but sometimes there are pieces that are much thinner than others so they can burn more easily. Second, use your nose, the carrots that has turned brown during roasting should smell good. It’s kind of a caramel smell. You will know when they are burned because it will smell like burned. If you follow my recipe normally it won’t happen. But you know your oven better than me, so proceed with caution.

When you sauté the diced onion in the same pan, it’s also the Maillard reaction that’s happening, and you will see more brown bits forming on the bottom and sides of the pan, some are actually from roasting carrots. Watch closely and don’t cook too long, 5 minutes max. We are combining the best of both roasted carrots and caramelized onion into the soup.

Now let’s talk about coconut oil.

Coconut oil is high in natural saturated fats, which can increase the healthy cholesterol in your body, but also help to convert the “bad” cholesterol into good ones. By Increasing the good cholesterols in the body, it can lower your risk of heart disease. Those saturated fats in coconut oil also have antimicrobial properties and help in dealing with various bacteria, fungi, and parasites that can cause indigestion.

Not because it has benefits that I’m going to switch to coconut oil 100%. I believe that everything should be in moderation. Poison in right quantity can be used as medicine. Too much good stuff can bring bad result. For cooking ingredients I always try to diversify as much as possible.

That’s why I use various kinds of oil in my kitchen for different applications. Recently I’ve been experimenting a lot with coconut oil. Coconut oil works great in baking applications, where the coconut aroma is not over-powering, and it goes really well with sweet food, that’s why I like use it to roast carrots. But it is not for cooking all the veggies, for example, coconut oil+mushrooms=meh!

Instead of using a different roasting pan and losing all the brown bits in the process, you need an oven-proof sauté pan or enamel cast iron pot for this recipe (less clean-up to do too!). We want a wider and shallow pot, so carrots will truly roast not steam. You can easily double this recipe, but remember to use bigger pan too to avoid over-crowding. After roasting carrots and sautéing the onion, we use cold water to deglazed the pan and a wooden spoon to scrape down all those brown flavorful bits into our soup. It should take 5 minutes or less. There is no need to further boiling carrots, they are tender enough to be blended at this point.

Last words: please please pay attention when handling the hot pan right out of oven! I speak from my own experience. :-p

 

I hope you can give it a try. And let me know in the comments if you like it.

xo, Qi