Jackfruit Lemon Quinoa Soup

Jackfruit Lemon Quinoa Soup is a simple yet delicious dish that is hearty enough to serve as a meal on a cold day. It's lemony and packed with flavor.

Most of the time it's pretty easy for me to take a recipe and turn it vegan. There are a lot of plant-based substitutes for traditional non-vegan ingredients and I've learned the tips and tricks on how to sub them into recipes. But sometimes I come across a recipe that I have no idea how to make work.

This was one of those recipes.

Jump to:

• What is Jackfruit?
• Other Vegan Substitutes
• Ingredients
• How to make Jackfruit Lemon Quinoa Soup
• Recipe Prayer
• Related Recipes
• Tried this recipe?
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• 💬 Comments

I was spending some time with a friend one day and she brought up this soup that her family makes. It was Chicken Lemon Rice Soup.

Not only does the recipe she shared with me have chicken as the main ingredient, it also uses chicken broth, calls for two eggs, and has rice as the starch (which I don't typically eat). Basically, the only vegan ingredient in the recipe was lemon juice.

I can't make a whole soup out of lemon juice, so I had to get a bit creative with my ingredients to try to put together a soup that somewhat resembled the recipe of her childhood.

First, the chicken. I know that in soup, the point of the chicken is less about the flavor and more about the texture, so I decided to use an ingredient well-known for its texture: jackfruit.

What is Jackfruit?

Jackfruit is what it sounds -- a fruit. A whole jackfruit is actually pretty big -- larger than a watermelon!  It has a hard outer shell. You would need a large knife to crack one open. But don't worry, we're not using a whole jackfruit for this recipe.

Inside the giant jackfruit are a bunch of pods. You can pull these pods out and chop them up. They take on a texture similar to pulled pork. Perfect to mimic chicken!

You can buy jackfruit from the grocery store in a can. And this is perfect for two reasons: first, we don't need to buy a machete to chop it open and second, we can buy it when it's unripe.

Since jackfruit is indeed a fruit, when it gets ripe it's pretty sweet. While that is nice, it's not what we want for this recipe. But unripe jackfruit is pretty neutral in flavor, so it's perfect to take on the flavor of the rest of this soup.

Other Vegan Substitutes

Besides jackfruit replacing chicken, I'm also replacing the chicken broth with vegetable broth -- easy. And I like quinoa more than rice so I just used that instead. But my next problem was eggs.

In baking you can easily use flaxseeds or chia seeds to make eggs. I decided to use flax eggs for this recipe, knowing full well that the original soup recipe benefited from the texture of the real eggs, something that I know I wouldn't get from the flax.

What I didn't expect was getting a nice thick texture from the flax eggs and getting hints of nutty flavor. While it wasn't the same result as what I imagined an egg would do, it worked out pretty well.

So that's my conclusion: this Jackfruit Lemon Quinoa Soup is different than the original recipe, but it's delicious in its own way!

Ingredients

I've already gone through most of the ingredients, but here's a formal list.

• Canned Young Green Jackfruit
• Vegetable Broth
• Quinoa
• Lemon Juice
• Flax Eggs
• Salt & Pepper

How to make Jackfruit Lemon Quinoa Soup

This recipe is pretty simple.

Step 1. Bring the vegetable broth to a boil.

Step 2. Meanwhile, prep the jackfruit. You'll need to drain the brine first. Then use a fork (or your fingers) to start pulling apart the jackfruit. Parts of it will come off just like pulled pork and other parts will remain together. If you don't mind large chunks, you can leave it like that. But if you want an even consistency, use a small knife to slice the chunks into pieces that resemble pulled pork.

Step 3. Once the broth boils, reduce the heat to low and add the jackfruit and quinoa. Let the mixture simmer for 20 minutes.

Step 4. Add the lemon juice and flax egg and heat for a few more minutes.

Step 5. Then, remove from the heat, season with salt and pepper, and serve. Enjoy!

Recipe Prayer

Thank you God for this meal. Thank you for keeping us warm with this soup. Thank you for giving us healthy alternatives to the food we love. Amen.

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