As the days get cooler, we often crave a nice soup or a delicate velouté to warm us up. However, we don’t always have the time to buy fresh vegetables from the greengrocer or supermarket to make them at home. This is where frozen soups come to our rescue! Before you dive headfirst into purchasing, I want to clarify some points about the ingredients, nutritional values, and some great pairings to make them a complete dish. As a nutritionist, I care deeply about these aspects and I think they might interest you as well.
How to Choose a Quality Frozen Soup
Let’s start with the basics: reading the ingredients in the soup you find in the frozen section of the supermarket. Generally speaking, the same rule applies to all products: the shorter the list of ingredients, the better the content. In the food industry, products are often supplemented with preservatives, oils, sugars, and the like! So how can we find the healthiest and most genuine product? Simply by carefully reading the labels. For example, Almaverde Bio soups, both the mixed vegetable version and the pumpkin and carrot combination, offer an excellent choice: their list of ingredients is very simple and mainly includes vegetables, water, and salt, similar to how they would be prepared at home.
A Quality Meal Saver!
Our lives are often so hectic that we have little time to go and buy everything fresh. For this reason, I like to call this solution a ‘meal saver’: you just need to open the bag, put it in a saucepan with some water, cook, and enjoy! Being made only of vegetables, you can also decide how to season it: a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, for example, will be perfect. But I’ll tell you more: a velouté can also become a complete meal if paired with a protein source and a carbohydrate source. Not sure where to start? Here are some ideas.
A Perfect Base!
I know, maybe you never thought about it, but the velouté, being very creamy and thick, can also become a delicious base on which to create a complete dish. Experimenting in the kitchen, I used the pumpkin and carrot velouté, with a sweet taste and very creamy texture, as a base for a fish dish. I recommend trying it with sea bream: the flavors match perfectly. In this way, you will have combined the protein source, that is the fish, with the vitamins and minerals from the velouté. Prepare the pumpkin and carrot velouté as indicated on the package, leaving it a little thicker, and use it as the base of the dish on which you will add the grilled sea bream fillet seasoned to your liking. To complete the dish, just add a source of carbohydrates, such as excellent boiled or baked potatoes.
A Simple Vegetable Source to Eat, Even for the Little Ones
If you have children, you know well: getting them to eat vegetables is not always easy. In the form of a completely blended velouté, however, everything seems simpler: there are no ‘annoying’ textures for their sensitive palate and, at the same time, there is no need to chew. Returning to adults, the velouté can be an excellent starter, to be paired then with a bruschetta with cherry tomatoes and ricotta balls. Here you have your complete and well-balanced dish! Sometimes we just need to let our imagination go: it’s possible to create many different combinations that are healthy and balanced at the same time.
Practical for You, Sustainable for the Environment
A particularly appreciable aspect of Almaverde Bio is their commitment to environmental sustainability. The issue of plastic and other harmful materials for the environment is well known. Almaverde Bio stands out by using a certified compostable material ‘ok compost’ for the packaging of their soups. This allows these packages to be disposed of in the organic waste collection, positively contributing to reducing the environmental impact.
What do you think? Will you try these convenient and ready-to-eat veloutés in just 5 minutes?”