Do you remember eating hearty vegetable soup on a cold winter day?  Do you remember how great it felt to be warmed from the inside out?  Just because you’ve decided to go vegetarian doesn’t mean that you can no longer have the hearty comforting taste of warm soup!  There are plenty of vegetarian soup recipes that use no meat or meat stock.

When looking for vegetarian soup recipes, a good place to start is knowing what type of soup you want to make, or at least which ingredients you’d like to use.  Would you like a thick lentil and barley soup?  How about a broth noodle soup?  Or a hearty vegetable stew?

All of these vegetarian soup recipes are readily available, both online and in vegetarian cookbooks.  If you have a favorite soup recipe that you just can’t give up and would like to convert to vegetarian, that is perfectly possible with all of the meat substitutes and other vegetarian food products available today.

How to Convert Meat-Containing Soup Recipes into Vegetarian Soup Recipes

To convert your old meat-containing soup recipes into vegetarian soup recipes, start with finding substitutes for the ingredients in the recipes.  For chicken or beef broth, vegetable broth is usually a good substitute.  Recently, many vegetarian and vegan food companies have begun making chicken, beef, or pork flavored bullion cubes that contain no animal products.  These are great for when you’re making vegetarian soup recipes that just have to have a distinctive flavor.

Once you’ve got your broth picked out, you’ll need to look at the other ingredients in your soup recipe.  If the recipe calls for chunks of a certain type of meat, you can usually find suitable meat substitutes made from soy or wheat. 

Textured vegetable protein, or TVP, is a popular and inexpensive alternative to most types of meat.  There are granules that can be used in the same way as ground beef, and chunks in many sizes that can be used in the same way as beef, chicken, or pork chunks.  The great thing about TVP is that it takes on the flavor of whatever it is cooked with, so if you cook TVP chunks in beef flavored broth they will come out tasting like beef.

Tofu is another great ingredient for vegetarian soup recipes.  It can be pureed to act like cream or other dairy products in a vegan soup, or cut into pieces for a meat substitute.  Like TVP, tofu takes on the flavor of the other ingredients it’s cooked with.  Tofu is also an excellent source of protein and calcium, making it an excellent choice for increasing the health content in your vegetarian soup recipes.

Vegetables are a terrific addition to most, if not all, vegetarian soup recipes.  You can experiment with new types of vegetables and discover combinations that make your mouth water.  Vegetarian soup recipes can even win over meat eaters because they don’t taste like what most people expect of vegetarian food.  They are filling, hearty, healthy, and completely satisfying, no matter what season it is.

Tags: Tofu, Vegetable Soup, Vegetarian Soup Recipes

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