Roasted Garlic Soup ‒ Paahdettu valkosipulikeitto

I recently noticed my whipped porridge in a Buzzfeed post about Finnish foods. It was an interesting listing altogether, featured many things you can find from this blog as well, like pea soup or cabbage casserole, and also reminded me of some dishes I'm yet to post, like korvapuusti or Karelian stew. But one item there didn't feel quite right. Garlic soup. Is that supposed to be some Finnish speciality? Yes, many Finns love garlic and there's even a garlic restaurant in Helsinki which serves garlic icecream, but I wouldn't call it any countryside stable. This soup I'd locate somewhere around Spain or perhaps even France.

Still, this is a perfect winter time soup to keep away flu, vampires and small-minded people. The modest outlooks don't really do justice to the wonderful complexity of the taste. Even if garlic isn't usually your cup of tea, you might still want to try this pleasantly smooth and sweet twist of it. Similarly to best of beers, the thing tastes like many things at once. You shouldn't start the cooking when your already hungry though, because it needs some time to develop all that symphony. Notice it's more of a starter than an entrée soup, though we enjoyed it paired with oven sandwiches consisting of rye bread, sun-dried tomatoes, smoked tofu, vegan sour cream and basil. The only important things in the soup are naturally the garlic roasting and onion caramelizing, but we based our version to a recipe which uses some beer as well, since hey, didn't someone just mention how good it tastes like?

- 7 whole garlics
- 4 onions
- 1 l vegetable broth
- 4 dl oat cream
- 2 dl strong tasting beer (or apple cider)
- 1 dl canola oil
- 2 tbsp farin sugar
- thyme
- black pepper
- salt

Cut the garlics in half breadth-wise. No need to remove the now halved cloves from their place, just put them in an oven casserole open side above and drizzle some oil on them. Roast in a 125°C oven for 1.5 hours. Now the cloves should be quite easy to peel.

Peel and chop the onions coarsely. Pour rest of the oil in a pan and heat up. Put the onions and garlics in the pan, turn down the heat to a mild temperature. This part takes a lot of patience as it may take up to 45 minutes. You shouldn't fry the onion but let it caramelize in time. Turn them occasionally and keep a low heat to prevent them from burning. They're ready when they look golden and taste sweet, just like the garlics when they came out of the oven.

Add the sugar and the beer with the onions. Let the mixture come in to a boil and then quickly add the broth. Put the lid on and let the soup simmer for half an hour or so. Add the rest of the ingredients. Cook for a few minutes more, smooth down with a hand blender and cure your flu.

Nutritional values / 2635 g:
energy 2136 kcal
fat 133 g
protein 44 g
carbohydrates 170 g
fiber 21 g