Hot or Cold Beet Fennel Soup | Everyday Dorie

This beet fennel soup comes with many inherent advantages. Dorie points out [with this soup] you can get a mountain of flavor from a molehill of ingredients. In this case, you have beets, fennel, onion and garlic. More to this point later.

On the mid April day, when the outside temperature almost reaches 90°F in New York City, the debate between hot or cold soup comes down clearly in favor of a chilled bowl of soup.

For me, the transition from the wintry snow-packed mountain for the Nastar Championships Final in Aspen last week to the summer heat back home is extreme. It’s hard to wrap my mind around it. So let’s make root vegetable soups (the first thing I did when returned home) and embrace the nourishment and comfort of them all.

When training and fitness consumed a good part of my time, cooking and blogging had taken a back seat lately. I wouldn’t say I took shortcuts… Somehow, I made a delicious butternut soup (a Claudia Roden’s recipe) a few days ago without sweating any aromatics; I was not missing any flavor.

The first step in making the beet fennel soup is to sweat and caramelize fennel, onion, garlic and herb, until softened. That takes about 15 minutes. It begs the question: will the beet soup tastes the same if I skip the aromatics all together?

I think it’s likely to be a close call. The beet soup carries such strong earthy flavor, it hardly needs anything else. The only must-do is to use fresh young beets, lots of them, which are sold in bunches with their leaves on. Along the same line, I dress the soup lightly with plain Greek yogurt and chopped fennel fronds. Less is more!