Irish Vegetable Soup (2024)

This creamy Irish vegetable soup is one of my favourite soup recipes. It's perfectly creamy and full of flavour. Serve with a slice of Irish soda bread slathered in butter for a delicious meal.

This easy homemade vegetable soup is my own version of the creamy Irish soup I used to have as a child growing up in Ireland. This isa lovely filling soup and most of all it's really easy to make.

Irish farmhouse soup was traditionally made with root vegetables. It was a great way to use up any odds and ends of vegetables. Traditionally Irish vegetables that were in season were used to make it.

I'm keeping this tradition by using a mixture of carrots, parsnips, potatoes and peas for this soup, but any vegetable would work well. This is a real bowl of comfort, great for any time of the year not just St. Patrick's Day.

🛒 What You'll Need

• Vegetables - For the base, you'll need an onion, yellow onions are best, celery and carrots. I also add potatoes, parsnips and frozen garden peas.
• Stock - I use a vegetable stock cube to make the stock for this. You can also use vegetable broth.
• Herbs - You will also need fresh thyme and bay leaf for this soup. If you like you can also add a sprig of fresh parsley as a garnish, that's optional though.
• Cream - I add double cream for this as it will give you the creamiest texture.
• Other Ingredients - You will also need olive oil, garlic, black pepper and sea salt.

🔪 How To Make Irish Vegetable Soup

This is a quick visual guide please see the recipe card below for full instructions

1. Start by cooking the chopped onion, celery and carrot in a little olive oil. Cook until the onion has softened, about 20 minutes.

2. Next, add the minced garlic and cook for a minute. Then add the potatoes and parsnips and stir in the stock.

3. Add the bay leaves and thyme, season with salt and black pepper then simmer until the potatoes are cooked, this will take about 20 minutes. Remove the bay leaves and thyme. Take two ladles of the soup and add it to a blender or food processor, blend until smooth then return it to the rest of the soup and stir well.

4. Add the frozen peas to the soup and cook for a few minutes, then pour in the cream. Stir well until the cream is warmed through.

👩‍🍳 Top Tips

• It's important to simmer the vegetables for at least 20 minutes at the start. This will give your soup more flavour and properly soften the onion.
• For best results use floury potatoes. Floury potatoes will help thicken your soup and make it lovely and smooth too when you blend some of it.
• Blending part of the soup and stirring it back in will give you the perfect creamy soup so it's important to not skip this part.

🔄 Variations

• Add more vegetables - this is a very adaptable soup so you can easily add more veggies if you like. Turnip or swede would work well in this. You could also add some kale if you liked.
• Add barley - pearl barley is lovely added to this soup and it will make it more filling.
• Blend it all - I love chunky soups, and I prefer this one to be chunky but you can blend it if you like. I would use an immersion blender (stick blender) to blend the soup until smooth.

❓FAQs

☘️ More Irish Recipes

If you're looking for some traditional Irish recipes that are also vegetarian then I have you covered! For a tasty side dish try my Traditional Irish Colcannon, it's perfect with a veggie Irish stew. If you need a good bread to go with your soup then try my Irish Brown Bread, it's so easy to make and is perfect with so many soups. Finally, if you're looking for a good Irish breakfast then my Potato Farls are perfect with a couple of fried eggs.

This recipe was first published Dec 2018. Updated March 2023 with new images and nutritional information.