This simple soup is by Yi Jun Loh, a Malaysian cook/ food writer/podcaster who studied chemistry at Cambridge and briefly attended culinary school in Paris and worked at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Check out his blog at Jun & Tonic.
This recipe came from his mother’s experimentations when his sister stopped eating meat. His mother sought to find a suitable replacement for chicken broth in ABC soup to retain its depth and sweetness of flavour. She struck gold when she used coconut water!
ABC Soup is a Chinese/Southeast Asian soup named for its nutritional contents: Vitamin A in carrots, Vitamin B in potatoes and Vitamin C in tomatoes; it’s as easy to make as the first three letters of the alphabet - ABC!
I like to use a simple, homemade vegetable stock instead of water. For this soup, I make the stock from an assortment of vegetables with lots of celery and a few pieces of kombu; it adds a nutritional boost and depth to the soup. If you don’t have stock on hand, go with filtered water.
The white peppercorn add a little zing but if that is not to your taste, leave them out.
However you choose to go, this soup is greater than the sum of its parts.
ABC Soup With Coconut Water
Ingredients
2 cups homemade vegetable soup stock (no salt or fats added)
1 litre organic pure coconut water (nothing added)
1 large or 2 medium white or brown onions, peeled and chopped
2 medium potatoes, scrubbed, peeled and chopped in to bite size chunks
1 large carrot, ends trimmed, peeled and julienned
2 ripe chemical free tomatoes, quartered
1 tsp Himalayan sea salt, or to taste
1 tsp crushed white peppercorns
Method
In a large Dutch oven, bring the soup stock and 2 cups of coconut water to a boil.
Add the chopped onions and potatoes and bring it back to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer uncovered on a low heat for 30 minutes.
Add the carrots and tomatoes and continue to very gently simmer for another 30 minutes.
Add the crushed peppercorns and the remaining coconut water and bring it back to a boil. Add the salt to taste.
Serve hot and slurp to your heart’s content!!!