Bolivian Recipes: Peanut Soup

The Sopa de Maní, a typical Bolivian Sunday dish. It is a peanut soup with noodles, beef, fresh vegetables - garnished with delicious fries. Here we would like to show you how to prepare a classic Sopa de Maní. The exact ingredients and the individual preparation steps can be found further down the page.

• 500 g soup meat (beef)
• Sunflower oil 200 g raw Bolivian heirloom peanuts (alternatively: regular roasted peanuts)
  
• 50 g peas
  
• 2 carrots
  
• 1 Celery Root
  
• 5 stalks of parsley
  

• 2 cloves of garlic
  
• 1 teaspoon Comino Molido
  
• 2 teaspoons of salt
  
• 300 grams of spaghetti
  
• 7 medium-sized potatoes
  
• 1 handful of oregano

• 1. We bring about 500 grams of soup meat to a boil in a pot with 3 liters of water.
  
• 2. At the same time, we bring the peanuts to a boil in another pot with some water. For about 5 minutes (this step can be skipped for already roasted peanuts).
  
• 3. We then put the nuts in a blender with about one liter of water. After a few minutes, we already have our peanut sauce ready.
  
• 4. We take 50 grams of peas, preferably fresh from the pod as here – and add them to the boiling beef.
  
• 5. We will now grate the celery root and the two carrots, and also chop the onion and parsley finely.
•  6. We put everything together in a pan and sauté our vegetables with a little oil.
  
• Finally, we add 1-2 pressed garlic cloves.
  
• 8. Grind a few grams of whole cumin seeds from Bolivia into powder in a mortar and add it to the pan.
  
• 9. Finally, we add the entire contents of the pan to our boiling meat with the peas, add another 2 teaspoons of salt – and let everything cook for a few more minutes. All together (starting from the moment we added the meat to the water) our Sopa de Maní should cook for at least 90 minutes.

• 10. For the pasta, we add about 300 grams of spaghetti to hot oil in another pan and fry the noodles until they are golden brown and nice and crispy.
•  11. For the fries, we peel the potatoes, about 6-7 medium-sized potatoes, and cut them into fries of the desired thickness and size. Then we wash out some of the starch from the potatoes, let them drain well – and finally fry them in a pot with heated oil – until they reach a nice color.
  
• 12. After about 90 minutes of cooking time, we add our prepared peanut sauce and the stir-fried noodles to the pot. The noodles can be broken into smaller pieces.
•  13. Now we add a good handful of oregano, stir the soup well – and then we are almost done.
  
• 14. After a few more minutes of cooking time, it can be served! The soup goes into a bowl and is finally garnished with our homemade fries.