This cheesy broccoli blender soup turns frozen broccoli, coconut milk, nutritional yeast, yogurt, and pantry seasonings into a creamy soup without chopping vegetables or cooking on the stovetop. My approach to Blender Soups has three key requirements: little to no fresh produce, virtually no ingredient prep, and quick and easy cleanup. I figure if I’m going to shop for fresh ingredients, chop everything, cook it, and wash multiple dishes afterward, I may as well make soup the traditional way. These recipes are for the days when I want something warm and vegetable-packed without all of that.

That approach does impose one limitation: I’m largely working with canned and frozen produce. My previous blender soups have used canned ingredients that are already cooked, but this time I wanted to see what I could do with frozen broccoli. The trick is to run the blender’s soup cycle multiple times so the broccoli has enough time to cook and soften. The frozen broccoli and coconut milk go into the blender from the start, with the repeated soup cycles gradually cooking the broccoli as everything blends together. Stop too soon and you’re back in hot vegetable smoothie territory, which is not what we’re aiming for! Yogurt, nutritional yeast, and lemon or lime juice work together to give the finished soup its creamy, cheesy flavor, while onion, garlic, herbs, and a little tamari or aminos add savory depth. Optional red pepper flakes provide a bit of heat. Speaking of heat, the blender contents become progressively hotter with each cycle, so be careful when removing the lid, particularly after the second and third cycles, when quite a bit of steam will have built up inside.

I’ll freely admit that my quick blender soups aren’t trying to compete with a pot of soup made slowly on the stovetop with fresh ingredients. They’re about convenience, and I find them a low-stress way to get more vegetables into a busy day with very little cleanup afterward. If you’d like to try this one with fresh broccoli, I’ve included some suggestions in the notes. One thing you may wish to keep in mind is that the nutrition has been calculated using broccoli cooked from frozen, which, for reasons I cannot fathom, has about half as many net carbs in the nutritional data as raw broccoli or broccoli cooked from fresh. Do with that information what you wish!