Provençal Soupe au pistou - Vegetable Soup with Basil Paste
Provence's summer soup: beans, courgette, potato and pasta, finished with a spoon of pistou - basil, garlic and olive oil, without pine nuts. It is not cooked in but folded through in the bowl.
Why this dish is good for you
Eleven grams of fibre a portion from five different vegetables and two pulses. Adding the pistou raw matters nutritionally: the basil's essential oils and the sulphur compounds of raw garlic would largely be lost to cooking.
Ingredients
- Potatoes(waxy, diced)300 g
- Courgette(diced)300 g
- Tomatoes(peeled and diced)300 g
- Green beans(snapped into two-centimetre lengths)250 g
- White beans(weighed dry, soaked overnight)200 g
- Carrots(diced)200 g
- Leek(the white and pale green only, in rings)150 g
- Wholemeal pasta(small shapes, weighed raw)100 g
- Olive oil(mostly into the pistou)45 g
- Parmesan(freshly grated, into the pistou)40 g
- Basil(two large bunches, leaves only)30 g
- Garlic(raw, into the pistou)20 g
- Salt(add only once the white beans are soft)5 g
- Water1800 ml
Method
- 1
Soak the white beans overnight, drain and precook them in fresh unsalted water for 50 minutes.
- 2
Put leek, carrots and potatoes on with the water and the precooked beans and simmer for 20 minutes.
- 3
Add courgette, green beans and tomatoes and simmer another 15 minutes until everything is tender. Season with salt only now.
- 4
Add the pasta and cook it in the soup.
- 5
For the pistou, pound basil leaves, raw garlic and a pinch of salt in a mortar, then work in the Parmesan and, little by little, the olive oil until you have a thick green paste.
- 6
Ladle the soup into bowls and stir a heaped teaspoon of pistou into each - not into the pot, where it would lose its aroma within seconds.
🌿 Pistou ist kein Pesto
Both names come from the Latin pistare, to pound. Ligurian pesto contains pine nuts, Provençal pistou does not - it is only basil, garlic, oil and sometimes cheese. The coast road between Genoa and Nice is barely 200 kilometres long.
Up-Food calculates calories, macro- and micronutrients for this dish, adds them to your daily balance and shows you which nutrients you are still missing this week.
- Nutrients per serving based on USDA and BLS reference data
- Add it straight to your weekly plan
- Send the ingredients to your shopping list
- Vitality score across seven days
No account, no payment details — you see the finished plan right away. See pricing
