Smokey and Giraffe's Low-Carb Kitchen: Smokey's Low-Carb Cheesy Ale Broccoli Soup

Friday, February 10, 2017

Smokey's Low-Carb Cheesy Ale Broccoli Soup

There's nothing like a bowl of creamy and savory soup for lunch or dinner in cool temperatures. The most challenging part of making delicious, creamy, and tasty soup is doing so in a low-carb setting.

Well, we've decreased the carbs, simply by substituting grated Parmesan Cheese for the flour ~ simply delicious!!!

Preparation time is about 15 to 20 minutes, while our actual cooking time is only 30 minutes.

We drove down to the grocery store to purchase our soup ingredients:

2 Boxes of Chicken Broth
1 8 oz. Package of Cream Cheese
1 12 oz. Can of Light Beer (1 1/2 Cups)
6 Cups of Shredded Cheese of Choice
1 1/2 Cups of Parmesan Cheese
3 Tbsp. Butter
5 Celery Stalks, Sliced
1/2 Chopped Onion
1 Head of Broccoli
1/4 Cup of Chopped Red Pepper
1/2 tsp. of Black Pepper

We started our dish by finely chopping our onions. We like to use our 1 Second Slicer that my mother bought us from As Seen On TV. However, we'll chop our onions even further, so we'll have tiny onions and big flavors in our soup.

Next, we'll chop our celery sticks into tiny pieces.

We'll then melt our butter in a large pot on medium high heat and will cook our onions and celery until the vegetables are slightly browned and translucent. This takes us about 10 minutes.

We'll stir occasionally, to make certain that our vegetables don't stick to the pot and burn.

Next, we'll chop our broccoli into florets.

We then continue by chopping our Red Pepper. One half of the pepper makes about 1/4th of a cup.

Next, we'll place our broccoli and red pepper into the cooked vegetable mixture and stir.

Now it's time to add our Chicken Broth.

We'll then add our pepper, Parmesan Cheese, will stir and bring the mixture to a boil.

We'll then lower the temperature and bring our soup down to a simmer.

Since we LOVE our cheese, we'll add 6 cups to our soup.

Next, we'll chop our cream cheese into blocks, will add to our mixture, and will stir until the cheese has melted and blended.

One would think that beer would add not only flavor, but carbs. However, Michelob Ultra Light Beer has only 2.6 grams of carbs per 12 oz.

So, we added 12 oz. or 1 1/2 cups of our Michelob Ultra Light Beer to our soup and increased our burner temperature back to a medium heat. If beer is not cooked at a higher temperature, then we run the risk of our soup tasting mostly of beer.

We'll then cook our soup for an additional 30 minutes, constantly stirring so that our cheese does not stick to the bottom of our pot.

I forgot to stir for a short period and noticed that my cheese had stuck to the bottom of our pot. Not to worry though. The cheese was only slightly browned and tasted fabulous!