Yumna Jawad’s Mediterranean White Bean Soup

Prep Time: 10 minutes
Cook Time: 25 minutes
6 servings

• 3 15-ounce cans of white beans. You can use navy beans, cannellini beans, Great Northern beans or any white beans will work. You can make this though with other types of beans or even chickpeas if you’d like. For convenience purposes, I use canned beans. However you can start with dried beans and soak them overnight instead.
• Onions, carrots, & celery: This forms the mirepoix of the soup base, which is essentially the aromatics that flavor this soup and many others.
• Garlic: Minced garlic or garlic paste, fresh garlic or frozen garlic, it all works in this white bean soup so you can use what you have. I love freezing garlic and using it in soups or other recipes that require cooking.
• Vegetable Broth: Look for one made with simple minimal ingredients. You can use low sodium or regular. If you use low-sodium, you may need to add more salt.
• Herbs: Fresh or dried work here. If you’re using fresh, you’ll want about 2 tablespoons total compared to 2 teaspoons total for dried. Since it’s a Mediterranean white bean soup, I think thyme and oregano work really well with the flavors.
• Spinach (optional): You can use other greens too like kale or collard greens.
• Grated Parmesan Cheese (optional): This is for topping at the end, but you can leave it out to keep it vegan.

How to make white bean soup

This is a pretty standard recipe starting with the mirepoix: mix of onions, carrots and celery. You’ll want to add the herbs pretty early on so they can help flavor the soup from the get-go. Cook until the vegetables start to soften, about 5-7 minutes.

Next add the vegetable broth and the white beans and let it simmer for about 15-20 minutes. The vegetables will continue to get tender and the soup will thicken.

Finally, add some fresh baby spinach or frozen chopped spinach, and mix it around until it wilts. This adds more nutrients to the white bean soup and also makes it more hearty.

And in about half an hour, this white bean soup is done and ready to be served. When the beans sit longer in the soup, the broth will thicken, so you can always add more water if it gets too thick. And if it’s not thick enough for your preference, you can use an immersion blender to blend the beans into the broth, which will thicken it.

You can enjoy the soup right away or let it sit for a while so it gets more creamy and thick.

Tips for making white bean soup
1. Add more vegetables. What makes this such a great easy soup recipe is its flexibility. Aside from onions, carrots and celery, it’s very popular to add fresh tomatoes or canned diced tomatoes to this recipe. I love the color of the vegetable broth and prefer keeping the tomatoes out of the recipe. You can also add zucchini, mushrooms, potatoes or peas.
2. Allow the beans to simmer with the broth. Since the canned beans are already cooked, it may seem unnecessary to add them to the soup until the very end. However, they actually absorb all the flavors of the soup, and soften to lend a creaminess to the soup. So make sure to add them when the broth goes in.
3. Stir the soup while it simmers. The canned white beans are very tender so they naturally make the soup thicker. But if you stir the soup and slightly mash the beans with a wooden spoon occasionally, it helps to break them down a bit more.
4. Make it extra creamy by stirring in some cashew milk. This is optional but adds a rich and creamy flavor to the soup while still keeping it vegan.