Love and Olive Oil

Brothy Broccoli & Potato Soup with Crispy Potato Skins

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With chunks of tender potatoes and broccoli florets in a flavorful broth—a refreshing contrast to the overly heavy cheese and cream of other broccoli soup recipes—this satisfying soup gets a crunchy, savory topping of fried potato skins (hooray for zero food waste!) and shaved parmesan cheese.

This broccoli and potato soup has a surprisingly flavorful brothy base made with just water (no broth or stock if you can believe it!) plus pancetta, tomato paste, garlic and green onions resulting in a surprising amount of flavor for such a limited number of ingredients (now that’s what I call dinnertime magic!)

Green ceramic bowl with a silver spoon filled with Brothy Broccoli & Potato Soup, bowl of Crispy Potato Skins and shaved parmesan in the background.

I think we all think of cream when we think of broccoli soup, and this is certainly not that. I think brothy is the best descriptor to counteract the assumption of cream. And sure enough, there’s no cream in sight.

Rather, this soup is chunky and satisfying in all the right ways, with a surprising amount of flavor considering the limited ingredients. It’s really one of our favorite soup recipes we’ve ever made.

The robust, brothy base (that actually uses no broth at all, just water) gets is satisfying flavor from pancetta, garlic, a bit of tomato paste and some green onions, combined with cubes of creamy potato, broccoli florets so soft and tender they almost melt in your mouth, and a sprinkle of Parmesan cheese on top for good measure.

Plus I surely can’t forget to mention the crispy fried potato skins, which add a beautiful crunchy contrast to the otherwise soft ingredients in the rest of the soup (not unlike fried tortilla strips on top of tortilla soup, which is obviously the best part).

The crispy potato skins and the shaved parmesan cheese are truly the icing on the cake, if you will. If the cake was soup and the icing was cheese and crispy potato skins.