Dinner · 45 min · Amounts not specified
Lentil, spinach and mint soup
After Ash-e reshteh
Persian herb and lentil soup. Noodles if you have them, mint in oil on top, yogurt. It should be thick enough to stand a spoon. Don't make minestrone.
The sheet · 4 bowls · 45 min
easyWhy tonight. Persian herb and lentil soup. Noodles if you have them, mint in oil on top, yogurt. It should be thick enough to stand a spoon. Don't make minestrone.
What it needs
Nothing confirmed on your shelf yet — this list is the whole ask.
- lentils
- spinach
- onion
- mint
- yogurt
Good if you have them, fine if you do not: pasta.
Method
- Fry the mint in oil separately until it darkens, and pour it over at the end. That fried mint oil is the finish and it is not optional.
- Onion browned slowly and deeply first, and some kept back for the top.
- Lentils and greens cooked together until everything collapses — this is a thick soup, not a brothy one.
- Noodles in for the last ten minutes only. Yogurt swirled in at the table, never boiled in.
Technique coach
What the method is trying to make happen
Sequence, correction, heat and texture, equipment workarounds, scaling, and component reuse are available with this cook sheet.
An educational plan from a curated corpus. Not a nutrition, allergen, or doneness guarantee.
Cook or pour it, then edit the shelf if you emptied a bottle or used the last of something.
The technique underneath this
Going wrong while you cook it? Say what it is doing and the triage will tell you what is happening, the smallest move, and the instinct to resist.
Watch the technique behind this one
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Reviewed video matched to this method, not to the cuisine. Opens in a new tab.
- EmulsionsHow to Make Classic Pasta Carbonara | Kenji's Cooking ShowJ. Kenji López-AltStarchy pasta water binding egg and cheese into sauce instead of into scrambled egg.Link checked 2026-09-08
- Knife skillsHow To Dice OnionsAmerica's Test KitchenWalks through the claw grip and the two cuts that turn a whole onion into an even dice.Link checked 2026-09-08
Why each of these is on the list
What the ingredients are actually doing
- lentils
- The fast legume — no soaking, thirty minutes at most.
- spinach
- Volume that vanishes. A pan-filling pile cooks down to a few spoonfuls, and the water it gives up will dilute whatever it lands in unless you wring it out first.
- onion
- The base under most of this library.
- mint
- Loud, cooling, and easily wrecked.
- yogurt
- Acid and creaminess together, which is why it works as a sauce with no cooking at all.
Missing one of them? The substitutions are written against those jobs rather than against a chart, so they say what each replacement costs this dish in particular.
Cooks from the same box
If you bought for this, you can already make these
Shares lentils, spinach, onion
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Frozen spinach is correct here.
Shares yogurt, mint
Cucumber raita
Salt the cucumber and squeeze it or the raita turns to soup.
Shares yogurt, mint
Labneh breakfast plate
Thick yogurt, a well of oil, mint, cucumber, pita. Salt it. This is breakfast or dinner. Don't call it a dip and hide it.
Shares yogurt, mint
Mast-o-khiar
Persian yogurt and cucumber. Mint, a little garlic, oil, walnuts if you have them. Thicker than cacık. Salt the cucumber. This is dinner with rice, not a dip.
Next
Cook it, then tell the shelf what you used.
The ranking is only as honest as the shelf behind it. Empty the cream, and everything that leaned on cream should stop being offered.