Black Bean Soup with Lime Crema and Cilantro Chimichurri – The most incredible, hearty black bean soup, served with a homemade lime crema and cilantro chimichurri

Soup season has finally arrived! It’s pretty rainy over here and once it stops it’s going to be quite chilly. The best way to get through these weather shifts is a big bowl of comforting soup.

For my first soup of the season, I wanted to make a soup I’ve been wanting to try all year long. I just can’t bring myself to enjoy hot soup when it’s still hot outside so I needed to wait for the weather to be a little cooler to really enjoy this soup in its entirety.

Now that the weather is turning, it’s finally time to make this Black Bean Soup with Lime Crema and Cilantro Chimichurri. I have been making lots of black beans recently because my daughter loves them. I’ve been experimenting with changing them up by adding spices and other veggies, making them super hearty. It got me thinking…why don’t I try out a black bean soup???

I developed a very basic black bean soup that really highlights the flavor of the beans. Then, I made a chimichurri sauce packed with cilantro, garlic, and lime juice which has so much pop in every bite. This would be used to drizzle over the soup, along with a homemade lime crema. To say that this soup is packed with flavor is an understatement!

Canned Beans vs Dry Beans

When making this black bean soup, I wanted it to taste the best as can be. Since beans are the main ingredient, I wanted them to really shine. I thought the best way to do this was to use dry beans instead of canned beans.

I had never used dry beans before but I heard that they take longer to cook and thus absorb more flavor of the soup and end up tasting incredible. Therefore, I decided to give them a try. Big mistake.

Dry beans hold their shape much better than the canned ones but that also makes them more firm in texture than canned ones. I didn’t particularly like this firmness. Also, because the beans cook for so long, they start to go from black to almost a purple color. My black bean soup started to look more like a purple bean soup. All in all, I wasn’t a fan of using dry beans.

Needless to say, the canned beans solved for all the issues I saw with the dry ones. They had the perfect texture that I was used to and they kept their black color because they only needed to cook in the soup for about 20 minutes.

Cilantro Chimichurri Sauce

With a black bean soup as yummy as this one, you may be asking “why the chimichurri sauce?” Well, let me tell you! I love adding chopped cilantro to my black beans, but the flavor seems to go away when the cilantro is cooked. Since the chimichurri is a raw sauce, you can really taste the cilantro. Plus, while being in the sauce, the cilantro is preserved so you can use up any leftover cilantro leaves you may have and make them last longer.

Lime Crema

I cannot enjoy black beans without a scoop of sour cream so I wanted to bring that same tradition to black bean soup. However, I took the sour cream to a new level by thinning it out into a crema by adding lime juice. I also added in a little lime zest for extra lime flavor and a little salt to balance it all out.

Tips & Tricks

1. For the chimichurri sauce, I used a food processor to help chop the ingredients finely. However, I’ve made chimichurri without a food processor, too – it just requires more work. To do this, just chop all the ingredients and add them to a bowl with good-quality olive oil.
2. The soup does not sit long after adding the beans and broth. Therefore, you want to make sure to cook the veggies long enough so they are soft before adding those two ingredients. Otherwise, you may bite into a crunchy piece of onion.
3. I didn’t want lots of spice in my soup so I took all the seeds out of the jalapeno before chopping it. If you want spice, add a few of the seeds into the mix.

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