It’s Fall and that can only mean one thing – soup season! If you are looking for the fast track to cozy cooking, try Jacques Pepin’s instant potato leek soup recipe. Jacques shares some great tips on how to prep and cook leeks, but you can always substitue for scallions if you don’t have one on hand.
What you’ll need:
1 qt. chicken stock, 1 leek, 1 – 1.5 cups potato flakes, salt and pepper, tabasco, 1/3 cup heavy cream, chives
Jacques Pépin Cooking At Home: Potato Leek Soup
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– Hi, I’m Jacques Pepin and I’m cooking at home. We make soup at home. Winter, summer, don’t make any different. Cold soup, hot soup. I wanna show you how to make a very easy one. I have a quart of chicken stock here. Of course, if you don’t have a quart of chicken stock, you can use water and about tablespoon and half,
Two tablespoon of chicken base. So I want to bring that to a boil and cook that with a leek here. Leek is great from in soup and you can see that leek is a little bit damaged, it’s been around in the refrigerator for a while.
So I will remove those first two things here, probably up to here. It’s no good, here, bit of the end here. What you want to do is to cut it in half this way, this way. And that’s when you rinse it underwater, you know,
All that beautiful light green color, that’s what you want. So here it’s clean. So now, of course, you could put scallion if you don’t have the leek or even onion to put, I like, and as you can see, I use a lot of the green, too.
I think it’s a mistake to remove all of this. I mean, very often a leek may cost up to a dollar apiece and I’ve seen people just cutting it on just to keep that part, no, use the whole thing. Okay, when my stock come to a boil, I wanna put this in there.
I just have to wait for that to come to a boil and boil a couple of minutes. Okay, this has been boiling for like three, four minutes and that’s fine. So I’m going to add a little flake to it. And of course those are instant-cooking, you know.
I have about a cup and a half here, so I don’t know whether I need the whole thing or taste it. No salt. I need salt in there and pepper. Remember, the stock that I add was no seasoning. Maybe I put a dash of Tabasco, like a few, a few drop.
So you can serve it just as is, but of course if you want to put a little bit of cream in it, have some heavy cream. You could put light cream, you can even put milk, you know, and I think that I put here maybe a third of a cup.
At that point, that soup can be almost like a Vichyssoise, the cold soup, you know, and you can be served this way. I have the chives coming out now, and even with the flowers of the chive, which sometime I use other decorations, so. That’s a very elegant soup.
Maybe a couple of chives on top and maybe those flower here, which are eatable, you know, taste a little bit like garlic. And this is this, instant potato soup for a nice dinner. Happy cooking.
23 Comments
Made this a few times. The potato flake trick is great. Leeks are pretty expensive here (I wish they were $1 USD each) so a few big onions is a decent replacement. A small amount of milk does fine as well and usually have that in the fridge instead of needing to buy cream.
As usual from the Chef, it's simple and delicious. I subbed Tarragon for the chives, and added water to thin it out a little and used an immersion blender to smooth it out. But those are the only differences. As usual, with over 30 years of doing his recipes, Chef Jacques rocks! 🥲🤘
Mr Jacques May we have a brief tour of your kitchen? I remember when Julia did it, it was fascinating!! I’m sure you use pretty much everything in there!! I love looking around while you’re filming in whatever location you are cooking in 💕❤️
Fuck no. Hard believe he was a renowned chef. Zero depth there.
What on earth are POTATO FLAKES? 👀🤷♂️ Four decades cooking & never once heard of “potato flakes.”
Beautiful and Delicious! Thank you Chef.
Love potato leek soup!!! Going to try this with some oat milk and veggie stock as I have a family history of Cancer so need to avoid the estrogen in dairy and Lead (Pb) in meat/bone broths. Thanks for posting
Love leeks
Where is the Potato Jacques???
I just love his simple style
Looks good 👍 and EASY 🤓
Merci beaucoup monsieur Pépin de nous partager une recette accessible à tous 🙂
I feel justified for often using instant mash instead of corn flour when I want to thicken a soup now 😅
He’s one of the few who ‘give us permission’ to use the green part of the leek.
He really is a first rate chef/cook.
Just made this soup for lunch,simple and delicious.The instant mashed potato trick is great(Bob`s Red Mill) and works well.Also received your latest book for XMAS.Thank you Chef your the best.
Dude even after a stroke this man is still in the kitchen recording content, making amazing delicious food and spreading his home cooking wisdom with a generation VERY GLAD to receive such wisdom. God Bless you Monsieur . Pépin!!! You are an inspiring man!
I just made and didn’t turn out as nicely as I would have liked. I think the issue was the broth that I used I use better than bouillon and I think I’m going to stop because it’s terribly salty and actually doesn’t have a very nice flavor. It is vegan but vegetable broth should always be vegan. I’m going to try to make my own broth and I’m also going to change the potatoes that I use. I will look specifically for potato flakes. The other option is that I have some frozen mashed potatoes that I had made at another time and I am thinking those might work also, I used vegan heavy cream and I think the taste was just fine but I also think a good solid, creamy oat milk would be nice too
I can't believe I never thought of using potato flakes before. What used to be a tedious chore is now a quick and easy soup to make. I prefer to sauté my leeks and scallions in butter first, then add chicken stock. I find 8 cups of stock with 2 cups of potato flakes works best.
He still alive my grandma watched him in the 80's and 90's
I didn’t have regular instant mashed potatoes but luckily found one with sour cream and chives in my pantry. Can’t wait to grow chives this spring!
Jacques, I've watched you cooking for over thirty years. I've always been a fan, even when you had a half hour show that aired on Saturday mornings in my area back in the 80s. I first had Leek soup while on a tour in England. We were in a little town close to Wordworths cottage and I stopped for lunch in a little Cafe. I tried your recipe and I love it, even my grandson loved it, he's 23. I'll make this often. I love how you make delicious meals with little or no effort. Simple, not hard or complicated. Bon Appétit, Linda in Tennessee.
Great !!!!
Fantastic recipe and so simple!