Climate-Friendly Cooking 🥕 Recipes

Provençal Potato Soup with Sun-Dried Tomatoes and Olives

A simple potato soup with a great twist of herbs, tomatoes and olives

11.01.2023 • Carbon Footprint: 1496 g CO₂e
Provençal Potato Soup with Sun-Dried Tomatoes and Olives

Recipe Categories:

Soup Vegetarian Quick and easy French Mediterranean

Ingredients:

potatoes onion broth wine cream feta olives tomato
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Potato soup doesn’t necessarily sound like a culinary firework, but this soup has a great twist thanks to the Mediterranean ingredients.

With a few herbs and some olives and dried tomatoes, the rather boring soup becomes an interesting meal. I love this soup from Provence, especially in winter, because it offers a bit of summer freshness and a cosy warmth in the belly. Olives and sun-dried tomatoes are readily available all year round. And the best of all, the soup is ready to serve in half an hour!

The recipe is originally from Suppengrün, a great soup restaurant in Constance. When I was a student, you could buy a cookbook there that I haven’t been able to find anywhere else since. You can find another recipe from the same cookbook and some memories of the restaurant in the article on bulgur soup with red lentils.

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Recipe

Provençal potato soup with sun-dried tomatoes

Provençal potato soup with sun-dried tomatoes

Ingredients

Preparation Time: 10 min

Total Time: 30 min

Servings: 2

  • • 400 g potatoes
  • • 1 onion
  • • 1 clove of garlic
  • • 1 tablespoon oil
  • • 1 teaspoon dried vegetable stock
  • • 300 ml water
  • • 65 g white wine
  • • 1.5 teaspoons dried thyme
  • • 1/2 teaspoon honey
  • • 1 pinch of sweet paprika
  • • 1 pinch of pepper
  • • 65 g single cream
  • • 65 g feta cheese
  • • 1 pinch of salt
  • • 50 g black olives
  • • 50 g dried tomatoes

Instructions

  1. 1
    Peel and chop the potatoes, onion and garlic.
  2. 2
    Heat the oil in a large frying pan and sauté the potato and onion cubes. After about 3 minutes, add the diced garlic and sauté. Add the white wine and water and bring to the boil.
  3. 3
    Add the dried vegetable stock, thyme, honey, paprika and pepper. Cover and simmer for about 20 minutes.
  4. 4
    While the soup is simmering, cut the feta cheese into large cubes. Slice the dried tomatoes and olives.
  5. 5
    When the potatoes are soft (test with a fork!), turn off the heat, add the cream and diced feta cheese and purée the soup. Season to taste with salt.
  6. 6
    Serve the soup with the diced olives and tomatoes.

Carbon Footprint

Carbon Footprint (2 portions): 1496 g CO₂e

This ranks it number 24 out of 57 recipes published on the blog so far in terms of estimated carbon footprint.

The estimated emissions are therefore slightly better than the average of the recipes.

Our Methodology Explained

Looking at the individual ingredients, cream and feta cheese stand out: These two ingredients account for almost half of the recipe's carbon footprint, even though they make up only about 12% of the ingredients' weight. The opposite is true for potatoes: They make up more than a third of the weight of the ingredients, but only about 5% of the emissions. Dried tomatoes are an interesting case: their poor CO2 balance is mainly due to processing and the relatively high water content of the tomatoes, which has to be removed. If the dried tomatoes were removed from the recipe, it would be in the top 25% of recipes published to date with the lowest emissions.

Comparison of Ingredients