Mulligatawny Soup is an English soup with Indian roots, and it translates loosely to pepper-water. Mulligatawny Soup can literally be anything & any ingredients, but most often curry/curry paste, chicken, legumes, coconut, carrots, and apples are used. The consistency (at least in the kinds I’ve had) has been puréed. This soup can also easily be adopted for other diets, simply swap ingredients that don’t work for you with others that do. Mulligatawny soup is meant to be a soup you can make differently each time you make it!
So here’s a version of Mulligatawny soup from Pioneer Woman’s Site:
Ingredients:
- 1 whole Boneless Skinless Chicken Breast, Cut Into Bite-Sized Pieces (could be easily swapped for faux Chik’in strips or another hearty veggie, like portabello mushrooms)
- Salt And Black Pepper To Taste
- 4 Tablespoons Butter (ghee could be used if you have that on hand…if you don’t know, ghee is a shelf-stable butter from India)
- 1 whole Medium Onion (try a different color or variety of onion to jazz things up!)
- 3 whole carrots (did you know that carrots have many different colors?)
- 3 cloves Garlic, Minced Finely
- 1/4 cup All-purpose Flour (this is used as a thickening agent, agar agar or guar gum serve the same purpose without the gluten)
- 1 Tablespoon Curry Powder (or curry paste if you love curry!)
- 32 ounces, fluid Chicken Broth (or veggie broth)
- 2 cups Half-and-half (or full fat coconut milk from a can would work well)
- 1 whole Granny Smith Apple, Peeled And Diced (this adds a surprising depth of flavor to the Mulligatawny soup…I’ve never had a variety without it)
- 1 Tablespoon Sugar (white Or Brown) More Or Less To Taste (or omit this entirely if you want)
- 2 teaspoons Salt, More To Taste
- Freshly Ground Black Pepper
- Cayenne Pepper (or a spice of choice or none)
To make the soup, you want to first cook your protein of choice thoroughly in a little bit of oil/butter (with chicken until the internal temperature is 165° F/ 75° C). Remove the cooked chicken, and add your garlic and onion into the same pan as the chicken. Cook until the onion starts to become translucent. Add the flour and the curry and thoroughly stir in to incorporate. Add the broth to de-glaze the pan (careful of the steam!). At this point, add the harder veggies like carrots (or any other veggies that you want to add) to provide them a longer cooking time. After 10 min or so (test the veggies to see if they are semi-soft/soft to the fork) add the cooked chicken, the other spices, half and half, and the apples. Cook for another 5-10 min or until all veggies/fruit are tender. Be sure to taste to see if you like how it tastes.
As an optional texture related final step, you can take out half of the soup, place into the blender, and blend until smooth. Add the blended soup back into the other half.
Voilà! You’re done! Enjoy!