Coconut Lemon Grass Soup

Lemon grass, suggestively belonging to the family of grass, is mainly grown for medicinal and culinary purposes in Asia. It has a unique citrousy sweet flavour that can bring out a difference (for good) in any dish that it is used in.

Apart from food, lemon grass is used in the form of oil, scented soaps, perfumes, insect repellents and preservatives. It is also used by farmers as a natural pest control mechanism.

From the culinary aspect, lemon grass can be used in the making of the main course or the side dishes or the starters or for that matter, a simple tea or soup!!!

I wanted to attempt combining the strong citrousy sweet flavour of lemon grass with aromatic coconut into a soup and yes, it worked and tasted divine.

Here goes its simple yet tasty recipe.

You may look into my one other lemon grass based recipe here:

Kuah Kacang

Preparation time : 5 minutes

Cooking time : 20 minutes

Total time : 25 minutes

Servings : 4

Ingredients :

Lemon grass : A small bunch ( or ½ cup of chopped lemon grass stalk)

Coconut milk : 1 cup

Chopped onion : ½ cup (or 1 medium sized)

Green chilli : 1

Chopped ginger : 1 tbsp.

Corn Flour : 3 tbsp.

Water : 4 cups

Coriander leaves : Little (For garnishing)

Method :

Quick video : https://youtu.be/yv4ukH08eK4

 

• In a pot, mix coconut milk, split green chilli, ginger, onion, lemon grass, water  and salt ; bring it to boil

• Continue heating in simmer for about 15 minutes

• In a bowl with 3 tbsp. of corn flour add little water and create a paste

• Remove the lemon grass bunch and add corn flour paste. Add salt if required. Continue heating for another 5 minutes

• Garnish with chopped coriander leaves and serve hot !!!

Note :

• Lemon grass bunch added is only to impart flavour, which is why we take it off after cooking.
• Lemon grass green can be replaced with lemon grass shoot, in case it is unavailable
• This recipe is medium on spice. If you want the soup to be more spicier, you may opt to include more green chillis

Lemon grass stories :

Mom used to include lemon grass in her cooking, occasionally though, but I never noticed it. My native village is surrounded by a lot of mountains and we head there regularly for sunset viewing during our stay. In one such visit, my dad showed us the lemon grass that were there in abundance, and shared their stories. He even mentioned how good it is for health and how tedious a task it is to extract a small bottle of lemon grass oil.

It seems, back in the olden days, daily in the morning, the lemon grass leaves would be plucked and put into a big vessel of water and kept for boiling. After hours of boiling, the steam collected on top of the lid covering the vessel and the oil floating on top, rathered called the distilled oil, was collected. The oil was then carefully extracted and collected in small bottles. Very strenuous in nature, this yielded only a handful of very small bottles of oil, thereby forcing people to look out for other modes of income.

Life was definitely not easy those days if we look back. The advent of technology is certainly appreciated in all these areas. Now with distillery setup with multiple machines and mechanisms for several rounds of distillation that takes place, human intervention certainly has reduced.

Well, the stories and further discussions continued on our way back home too. Before it was dark, we could grab some lemon grass greens along with few shoots. As it turned out to my utter disbelief, lemon grass was hard and sharp to pluck, contrary to the usual smoothness of a grass!!! At the onset, dad had made it a point to take a small kitchen knife with him. When asked why, he had said that we would be needing this to pluck the lemon grass, to which I had replied that it should be an easy job to pluck it using bare hands. He had smiled then and had said – you will see when we actually do it!!! And lol, he was right!!! It appears to be soft and gentle. But when you try to pull it, the sharp edges of the leaves will end up hurting your fingers. We just grabbed a few and got back home. With the shoots, I prepared the peanut sauce, the recipe for which I have shared earlier. With the greens,I thought of trying out a soup in the same evening… it was loved by one and all.