Leblebi Soup

Ingredients

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• 2 Tbsp vegetable broth 🛒
• 1 medium finely diced Onion
• 8¾ oz Chickpeas
• 6¼ cup Vegetable Stock 🛒
• 1 tsp Cumin
• 5 clove Garlic
• ½ tsp Salt
• 1 tsp Harissa Spice
• pinch Pepper
• ½ Lime

Method

1. Heat the vegetable broth in a large pot. Add the onion and cook until translucent.
2. Drain the soaked chickpeas and add them to the pot together with the vegetable stock.
3. Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and cover. Simmer for 30 minutes.
4. In the meantime toast the cumin in a small ungreased frying pan, then grind them in a mortar.
5. Add the garlic and salt and pound to a fine paste.
6. Add the paste and the harissa to the soup and simmer until the chickpeas are tender, about 30 minutes.
7. Season to taste with salt, pepper and lemon juice and serve hot.

About the ingredients

vegetable broth

A salt-free, all-purpose vegetable broth. Onion, carrots, celery, garlic, tomatoes, mushrooms, kombu, parsley.

Onion Allium cepa

Bulb vegetable, eaten raw or cooked. Whole minimally-processed plant food; 'organic' refers to cultivation only. WFPB-canonical.

Chickpeas Cicer arietinum

Chickpea: edible seed of the legume Cicer arietinum, domesticated in the Near East ~9,000 years ago. Eaten whole (boiled, sprouted, roasted) or ground. Rich in plant protein, fiber, folate, iron, manganese. A whole-food legume, canonical WFPB.

Cumin Cuminum cyminum

Dried seeds of Cuminum cyminum, an apiaceous herb. Whole spice, mechanically harvested and dried; matrix intact whether whole or ground. Canonical whole-plant seed spice.

Garlic Allium sativum

Garlic itself is canonical, but extract denotes a concentrated/isolated derivative outside the whole-food canon. Marketed as natural/healthy supplement, hence mistaken-as-WFPB flag.

Salt NaCl

Crystalline sodium chloride, harvested by evaporating seawater or mining rock-salt deposits. Used as seasoning and preservative since antiquity—central to trade and food economies for millennia. A mineral, not a plant food, and a sodium isolate; noncanonical to WFPB.

Harissa Spice

Dry North African seasoning blend of ground dried chilies with caraway, coriander, cumin and garlic — distinct from the oil/salt-laden harissa paste. As a pure ground-spice blend with no added oil, sugar, or salt, it is canonical like garam masala.

Pepper Piper nigrum

Dried unripe fruit (peppercorns) of the pepper vine, used whole or ground. A whole dried spice with nothing added or extracted. Canonical WFPB aromatic.

Lime Citrus aurantiifolia

Distinct from fresh lime juice (canonical). Concentration is an industrial vacuum-evaporation step removing fiber and concentrating sugars/acids.