Salad soup

From this:

The raw materials: salad

to this:

The end result: salad soup

This bold experiment is the result of a discussion about what to do with left-over dressed salad. Normally it just gets thrown away, but I remembered reading about someone using it to make gazpacho. I though this sounded disgusting. But last night we had 14 people for dinner, and we made a huge fattoush salad: lettuce, onions, yellow pepper, tomatoes, cucumber, and mint, with toasted diced pitta bread thrown in at the last minute.There was so much I didn’t have a bowl big enough, so I made it in my huge stockpot, and although we ate a lot there was a lot left over.

Given that it was in the stockpot, why not try it? So here is … left-over salad soup!


I debated whether to remove the pitta bread, but hey, gazpacho has bread in it. So I left it in. The dressing was just lemon juice and my best olive oil, so I just put the pot on the heat and sauted the salad gently for a few minutes.

Then I added some Marigold bouillon powder and water and brought it to the boil.

Stage 1: simmer the salad

Looks disgusting, doesn’t it? It looked even worse in the blender after I’d simmered it for 20 minutes.

The colour of the end result was a bit disappointing — it was kind of … beige. But it tasted surprisingly good; if you served it to someone without telling them what it was, I don’t think they’d guess. Unfortunately now I have about 5 litres of the stuff. But next time you have a lot of left-over salad, it’s worth a try!

The end result: salad soup

4 thoughts to “Salad soup”

  1. I so wish I’d read this on Sunday before throwing out the remains of a big salad! But I’ll be sure to try it next time 🙂

  2. I’ve looked for a good recipe for lettuce soup for years, after reading it as a menu item in Elizabeth Goudge’s “Castle on the Hill”. Thank you! (I found you via a link from Little Ivy Cakes which I found via a link on Couture Cupcakes…I love browsing through links…)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *