The soup came out a delicious colour and texture (although as other users mentioned, it DOES take about 40-45min to cook the beets through). Since I had some other vegetables to use up, I added one carrot and two sticks of celery (all grated) to the beets as they were boiling, then blended it all together.
You'll need to serve this soup with something else (ie, crusty bread), as it's not quite filling enough on its own.
Delicious! One of the best soup recipes I've ever made. I made the recipe with chicken broth instead of beef stock, and it made the soup a bit lighter.
We had some beets in our produce co-op that we didn't know what to do with. This recipe was great! We didn't have enough beets so we added some potatoes too. Easy and yummy!
After cooking for 30 minutes the broth had great flavor. Then I blended the soup and it had the consistency of thick grainy pudding. It would have been great if I had not put it in the food processor. What a waste of beets. I even added some more beef stock to try to smooth things out and it was still grainy.
I made this in my VitaMix in about 7 minutes. I micro'd the stock and then blended on high with the raw beets. I sauteed the rest and added to the mixture. It was yummy!! Even my 7 year old vegetable hating daughter had several spoonfulls.
I just discovered a new love for beets! I sliced the beets thin which allowed the cooking time to stay closer to the approximated 20-25 minutes.
Great option for beets in a healthy dish. But make sure your beets are fully cooked otherwise you will get a grainy/lumpy cream.
In response to the review written by gina w. on Jul. 18, 2006.
I've made this soup a couple times now and every time its turned out perfectly smooth. I know from experience why her soup came out chunky and it can be explained by the method of blending.
She mentions using over 8 beets. I've made the soup with as little as 2 very large beets and with more than 8. I have also added a couple carrots and sweet vidalia, just for the heck of it. Both occasions with the addition of more vegetables, it still turned out smooth. When writing a negative review its important to tell us what kind of blender or food processor was used and whether you were able to liquefy the soup in portions. Properly.
If having 6 or more beets its important to be dutiful with blending. You may have to do it a couple more times to ensure you've done it correctly. Sometimes if you put less content in a container for blending the blades throw the chunks to the top and regardless of how much time you leave it blending, because the speed of the blades is so high the chunks never get blended correctly. Its important to reconstitute different parts of it back into other parts and allow it to be liquefied again and again to ensure that its perfectly smooth.
I've used a Magic Bullet blender and had some difficulty in getting the soup perfectly smooth. That's because you have a small capacity for blending which creates more work. Which often equals a chunky soup.
* Add chili powder to make it SPICY!
This was easy but not exactly quick - the beets took longer than I'd expected. Oh and I don't have a blender so I couldn't puree the soup but it was still pretty good.
