This chili is fast, tasty, and made with four different kinds of beans and stewed tomatoes. For a lunch or dinner in the fall, it tastes fantastic served in bowls and topped with cheese.
| Prep Time: | 15 mins |
| Cook Time: | 15 mins |
| Additional Time: | 3 hrs |
| Total Time: | 3 hrs 30 mins |
| Servings: | 6 |
| Yield: | 6 cups |
Ingredients
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 1 cup leeks – halved lengthwise and chopped
- 1 pinch salt
- 4 cups chicken broth
- ground black pepper to taste
- 1 pinch cayenne pepper, or to taste
- 1 pound sugar snap peas, ends and strings removed
- 2 fresh mint leaves
- 1 tablespoon creme fraiche
- 2 fresh mint leaves, cut into very fine strips
Instructions
- Pour olive oil into a large pot, set over medium heat, and add leeks to hot oil. Season leeks with a pinch of salt. Cook, stirring often, until leeks are soft, 5 to 6 minutes. Pour chicken broth into leeks; bring to a boil. Season with black pepper and cayenne pepper.
- Stir peas into boiling broth mixture and add 2 mint leaves. Bring back to a boil and cook until peas are bright green and have started to soften, 5 to 6 minutes.
- Turn off heat; use a slotted spoon to transfer vegetables into a large blender, leaving liquid in pot. Pour half the liquid from the pot into the blender, place a folded towel on the blender lid, and pulse a few times to chop vegetables. Blend at high speed to puree vegetables. Add remaining liquid from pot to blender and liquefy the soup until smooth.
- Pour soup from blender into a fine mesh strainer set over a bowl and use a spatula to push soup through the strainer, leaving the tough fibrous material behind.
- Cool soup to room temperature, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate until thoroughly chilled, about 3 hours.
- Season cold soup with salt and adjust cayenne pepper. Ladle soup into a serving bowl. Spoon creme fraiche into a plastic squeeze bottle and squeeze the creme fraiche over the top of the soup in a loose spiral. Use a skewer to pull the spiral into flower petal shapes, starting from the middle and quickly pulling the skewer through the creme to make pointed petal shapes. Serve garnished with strips of fresh mint.
- If you’re not going to use creme fraiche or sour cream for garnish, I highly suggest you squeeze a little bit of lemon juice into the soup.
Nutrition Facts
| Calories | 84 kcal |
| Carbohydrate | 9 g |
| Cholesterol | 7 mg |
| Dietary Fiber | 2 g |
| Protein | 3 g |
| Saturated Fat | 1 g |
| Sodium | 670 mg |
| Sugars | 1 g |
| Fat | 4 g |
| Unsaturated Fat | 0 g |
Reviews
No. I can’t believe it , but I guess it was bound to happen. I LOVE Chef John’s recipes, but this one just didn’t work for us. Maybe I’m just not a cold soup person, but I found this horrible. Sorry, I wish I could pretend but I threw away the rest after suffering though a bowl. Couldn’t do it.
So refreshing and flavorful. Used baby shelled peas from Wegman’s. Lacking the time and skill At the time for creme fraishe, I added a dollop of sour cream and garnish on top.
I’m starting to get tired of telling Chef John how great his recipes are, but he did it again. A light refreshing soup. Just a bit a spiciness and the tang of some fresh lemon juice in the sour cream and a little more on the soup. I did use fresh peas instead of snap peas. IF you use a Vitamix to blend the ingredients you don’t need to strain BUT be careful blending/ chopping. DONT overdo it and add too much air to the soup. It becomes more like whip than soup. Otherwise VERY Refreshing
This is absolutely delicious!!
I made it as written, but was a little sloppy with the cayenne so it was spicy! Very good, and next time I’ll use a bit less heat and a touch more mint. Very refreshing soup and used my CSA veggies in a creative way.
FABULOUS soup!!! 10 STARS!!
I didn’t enjoy this soup at all. The soup may be fine overall, I believe I just learned that I simply don’t like cold snap pea soup. I’ll stick to making hot soups in the future.
Tasteless and watery.
I used onion instead of the leeks and topped it with sour cream. Very yummy. Today I’m trying the leftovers hot.
In Columbia County, NY we have a bounty of sugar snap peas in the spring. This is a great way to use them. My suggestions: increase the mint by one leaf, use a medium mesh strainer to get out the strings that sometimes appear, season with Adobo instead of plain salt to give some extra depth of flavor. Hot (with some homemade croutons) or cold with sour cream on top this is a winner.
really good. I preferred it hot to cold, but its good both ways. I had a really hard time straining it. When I used the finest mesh, it just wouldn’t go through. When I used a larger mesh, too many strings made it through. But even with a few strings, it was great.
Super easy! Substituted frozen peas for snap peas and it turned out great! Will definitely make again 🙂
loved it! Perfect cool soup.
Instead of a leek, I used an onion, and replaced the chicken broth with turkey broth. This has great flavor, with the gentle taste of mint being quite welcome!
I made this but was on a liquid diet and could not wait for it to cool. It was so good. I did also have it cold and both were extremely good. It is good both ways.