Bolivian Peanut Soup

This delicious soup my Bolivian friend taught me might be a 7000-year-old recipe. Click at right for the story, recipe and how-to-photos.

Photo: Yulia Converse.

See How to Do It

Bolivian Peanut Soup

Sopa de mani

While the meat is cooking in the salted water, cut your veggies...

Put the veggies in the soup.

Skim off foam and fat as they rise to the top of the broth.

This is the incredible quilquina plant. It's as strong as cilantro, only different.

Make an herb bundle of parsley, cilantro, and quilquina if you have it, and slice across it over a bowl.

These are the raw peanuts. Okay, they aren't WHITE, but they're almost white. Cream colored. They turn super white in the blender with water.

raw peanuts + water look like a milk shake! But don't drink... it must be cooked!

Add mashed garlic and spices to the peanut soup broth

The butcher cuts in Bolivia are 1 inch segments. Here they're honkin' big, so we took the meat off the bone, discarded the bone and returned the meat in bite size pieces into the soup.

She rubbed the oregano between the palms of her hand over the pot, releasing herb mojo. Awesome.

Raw potato, cut up for frying.

Frying the potatoes next to the soup pot

The lovely grounds of the Sweetser Apple Barrel and Orchard, where Rommy is the farm manager... and resident Bolivian cooking guru.

And finally, the one and only, sopa de mani.

Photos by Lindsay Sterling and Yulia Converse.

The Story

Peanuts are White, Folks

By Lindsay Sterling

I’m into peanuts these days for a handful of reasons. I recently learned how to cook an awesome peanut soup from Ghana. Soon after learning that, I happen go to, of all things, a professional peanut conference in Napa Valley. I sat next to – I’m not kidding – a VP of Peanut Butter. He works for Smucker’s. Nice guy. Scientists basically told us at the conference that peanuts are little vitamin pills. A couple days after I get home, my Bolivian friend offers to teach me how to make her favorite soup, sopa de mani. Guess what mani means. Peanut. I’m like, what thuh...why are peanuts suddenly coming at me from everywhere?

Well, the phenomenon has been a good ten thousand years in the making. From the moment Mother Nature gave birth to peanuts (it is thought in Bolivia) over 7600 years ago, they’ve been getting around. A necklace of gold and silver peanut shells found in a 2000-year-old tomb in Peru shows how much people revered them. (This necklace is stunning. Ever since I saw its picture online, I want it. Honey?...The Lord of Sipán’s necklace? For my birthday?) It is thought that Spanish or Portuguese explorers then introduced peanuts to Africa and Asia. Peanuts, it is thought, came to us by way of the African slave trade.

Well, you won’t believe our luck, but my Bolivian friend happens to be 99.9% Quechua! That’s a native population in Bolivia that goes back way before Europeans ever arrived. She could be the progeny of one of the original peanut eating peoples on the planet! Her grandparents still make sopa de mani at 3am and eat it for breakfast at 5am, before going to work in the potato fields. So...we’re talking about a cooking method – blending peanuts and using them in soup broth - that could go back, like, seven thousand years! Most of the main ingredients in this soup are native to Bolivia: potatoes, peppers, green beans, and peanuts. The Spaniards and Portuguese likely inspired adding beef, garlic, carrots, and oregano, after they came in the 1500s. Before they arrived, the soup was likely vegetarian or made with alpaca meat.

Now here’s what really threw me when I watched my Bolivian friend cook. All my life I thought peanuts were brown, but that’s only because I’ve never pulled a peanut out of the ground, peeled off the fibrous shell and papery red skin, and looked at the raw, unprocessed nut (technically, a legume). It’s white! She blended the raw nuts in a blender with water, and the puree looked as white as a vanilla milkshake. She intercepted me from tasting it, though. “Raw peanuts need to be cooked an hour at least or it makes the tummy ache. That’s what my mom says.” 

We mixed the puree into the soup broth we’d made of beef ribs, water, salt, diced onion, green pepper, carrot, red pepper, and slivers of green beans, and the soup turned as white as clam chowder. In the end, she placed a mound of fried potato strips in the middle of each bowl, and sprinkled chiffonade of fresh parsley and cilantro on top. Each person at the table put in their own dollop of a homemade hot sauce, llajua. “YAH hwah,” I practiced saying it. It sounds like how I feel about learning this soup. You’ve got to try it.

Copyright Lindsay Sterling 2011

Print the Recipe

Bolivian Peanut Soup

Sopa de mani

As Rommy Holman, from Cochabamba, Bolivia, taught Lindsay Sterling in Cumberland, Maine, June 2011

Serves 8

Cooking Time: 2-3 hours.

1 Tbsp salt

4 beef ribs or bone-in cut of beef

1 small red onion

2 small carrots

1/2 green pepper, medium dice

1/4 red bell pepper, medium dice

10 green beans, sliced diagonally across for long, thin ovals

1/2 pound skinless raw peanuts (they're not tan or brown, they're cream-colored and may be called blanched)

4 yukon potatoes

1/2 cup white rice

1 big clove garlic

1/2 tsp powdered cumin

1/4 tsp black pepper

handful fresh cilantro

handful fresh parsley

small bunch fresh celery leaves

1/4 cup peas

crusty bread

llajua (a fresh hot sauce condiment)

1 tomato

1 jalepeno

small handful cilantro

1 tsp dried oregano

Fill soup pot 2/3 full of water, add 1 Tbsp salt and beef. Bring to boil and simmer for 1 hour or two (longer for the tougher cuts of meat). Keep a lid on to keep broth from evaporating too much. As the soup simmers, skim any fat and foam that rise to the top of the soup with a big flat spoon into a small bowl for easy discarding.

While the meat broth is brewing, cut your veggies. cut carrots lengthwise into 1/4" thick planks and then crosswise into 1/4" strips. Dice green and red pepper and onion. And cut the green beans on the diagonal to make thin long ovals. Put the veggies in the soup pot.

Make a raw peanut puree by blending the peanuts in a blender with about a cup of water until you have what looks like almost melting vanilla ice cream. After the meat has cooked for at least an hour, add the peanut puree so the soup turns white with a creamy top surface. Continue cooking for an hour. I wouldn't fudge that particular cooking time because Rommy said, "Raw peanuts need to be cooked an hour at least or it makes the tummy ache. That's what my mom says." An hour then! Stir occasionally so peanut particles don't burn on the bottom. As this cooks, go ahead and do the following.

Mash garlic and 1/4 tsp pepper and 1/2 tsp cumin (and a little salt to aid the grinding) in a mortar and pestle. Don't forget to smell this because it's VERY satisfying. Add to soup.

Now it's time to prep for the soup garnishes.

Make a bowl of fresh feathery herbs by gathering a tight bouquet of parsley and cilantro (she'd also use quilquina if she were home) and cutting across them toward your thumb with a paring knife. Fry potato strips.

Make fried potato strips by slicing potatoes across into round slices, and then slicing across the the slices to make thin strips. Covered with water (to keep from turning brown) until soup is almost done.

Make homemade hotsauce, called llajua, by pulsing in the the blender ever so slowly fresh jalapenoes, tomatoes, and fresh cilantro (again, she'd use quilquina at home). Her mother would make it on a traditional tool, a rectangular mortar and pestle called a batan. Avoid putting the blender on full blast - it makes the hotsauce foamy, which is not authentic! Serve in dishes on table for individuals to spoon into soup as they like.

After the peanuts have simmered with the soup about an hour, add a cup of rice. After rice has cooked for about ten minutes, use cooking twine to tie a bouquet of celery leaves and parsley leaves and steep bouquet in the soup. Sprinkle dried oregano over top. Now taste the soup. Add salt so that it tastes the best it can be. I added about a tsp. Take meat out of the pot. Pull meat off bone, discard bone, and put meat back in soup.

Strain potato strips. Pat dry with paper towels. Heat a half-inch of oil in a frying pan on medium high. Get a plate with paper towel over it ready for drying the fries. Test one strip in the oil. You want it to bubble vigorously. If it doesn't, let the oil get hotter before adding potatoes. They'll come out soggy if you add them to not-hot-enough oil. If the oil is smoking - it's too hot. The fried potato strips are done when they're golden brown; remove them from the oil with a slotted spoon or tongs and put them on paper towels to dry. Salt them.

When the rice in the soup is cooked, add peas. When they're cooked, serve soup in shallow bowls, sprinkle fried potatoes in the center of each bowl and fresh herbs all over top. Serve with chunks of baguette and the llajua on the table.

copyright Lindsay Sterling 2011