‘The Pioneer Woman’ Star Ree Drummond’s Brocco-flower Soup Is ‘Absolutely Luscious’
A delicious spin on her popular broccoli-cheese soup, Food Network star Ree Drummond’s Brocco-flower Soup brings cauliflower to the flavorful party. And here’s how to make your very own bowl.
Ree Drummond says her Brocco-flower Soup ‘is an absolutely luscious veggie soup’
In her cookbook, The Pioneer Woman Cooks Super Easy, Drummond describes this hearty meal as something of a celebration of one of her favorite vegetables, broccoli.
“I love a good broccoli-cheese soup, but this one brings in a bit of cauliflower to make things interesting,” the culinary personality writes. “This is an absolutely luscious veggie soup, and it uses two forms of broccoli: fresh florets and frozen broccoli pieces.”
There’s a strategy behind Drummond’s use of both fresh and frozen broccoli, she explains: “The florets give the soup a fresh broccoli flavor, but the bag of frozen pieces is a super-cheap, easy way to bulk up the soup. (No need to use all fresh when you’re going to puree it anyway!)”
She adds that home cooks can certainly choose to use all fresh broccoli cuts for the soup, or all frozen, making the good point that “the soup is great any way you slice it.”
You can find the complete recipe in Ree Drummond’s cookbook, The Pioneer Woman Cooks―Super Easy!: 120 Shortcut Recipes for Dinners, Desserts, and More.
The chef’s soup is packed with veggies and cheese
Drummond’s recipe calls for salted butter, one large head of broccoli cut “into very small florets,” one large head of cauliflower also cut into florets, diced onion, minced garlic cloves, all-purpose flour, vegetable broth, whole milk, half-and-half, frozen broccoli cuts, smoked paprika, cayenne pepper, grated cheddar cheese, jarred pimientos, jarred sliced hot cherry peppers, and minced fresh parsley.
Once the fresh broccoli, cauliflower, onions, and garlic are cooked until tender in the butter, the flour is added (Drummond says it’s important to save a bit of the broccoli and cauliflower for later). At this point, she adds in the broth, followed by the milks and the frozen broccoli. The seasonings are stirred in and the mixture can simmer, “stirring occasionally for 18 to 20 minutes, until the broccoli is soft.”
The soup is pureed with an immersion blender or, Drummond recommends, it can be pureed in a blender after the mixture has cooled. The vegetables set aside earlier are stirred in along with the cheese, pimientos, and cherry peppers. Once the cheese has melted, it’s ready to serve.
Drummond’s Brocco-flower Soup is a nod to her popular broccoli-cheese soup
Her veggie-centric soup picks up where her Broccoli-Cheese soup left off, sharing the stage this time with cauliflower.
Drummond noted on her website about the original, “Broccoli-cheese soup is my life. There’s something about it that triggers a happy, peaceful memory. I just don’t know what the memory is. So I guess technically, it isn’t really a memory at all. I think a memory, by definition, is something that someone actually has to remember. Never mind. Broccoli cheese soup is my life. I should have stopped there to begin with.”
