Recipes › Chives › Chive and Potato Soup with Soured Cream
Chive and Potato Soup with Soured Cream
A silky, deeply flavoured potato soup where chives do far more than garnish — half go in during cooking to build a grassy, onion-forward base, and the rest are stirred through just before serving to keep that fresh brightness. Proper, unfussy soup that tastes exactly like a summer garden. Serve hot or cold depending on the weather.
Chives is in season now. More chives recipes, or see what to sow this month where you are.
Ingredients
- 70 g Chives, finely chopped, divided
- 800 Floury potatoes (Maris Piper or King Edward), peeled and cut into 3cm chunks
- 2 White onion, roughly chopped
- 3 cloves Garlic, roughly chopped
- 1200 ml Vegetable stock, hot
- 40 g Unsalted butter
- 150 ml Full-fat milkor use single cream for a richer soup
- 120 g Soured cream
- 1 tsp Fine sea salt
- 1 tsp White pepper, freshly ground
Contains: milk, cereals gluten.
Method
- Melt the butter in a large saucepan over a medium-low heat. Add the onion and a pinch of salt and cook gently for 8 minutes, stirring occasionally, until soft and translucent but not coloured.About 8 min
- Add the garlic and cook for a further 2 minutes. Add the potato chunks and stir to coat everything in the butter.About 2 min
- Pour in the hot vegetable stock. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for 18 to 20 minutes until the potatoes are completely tender when pierced with a knife.About 20 min
- Remove the pan from the heat. Add 40g of the chopped chives (just over half) and the milk. Use a stick blender to blitz the soup until completely smooth. Season generously with salt and white pepper.About 3 min
- Return the pan to a low heat and warm gently — do not boil after blending. Stir in the remaining 30g of fresh chives.About 2 min
- Ladle into warmed bowls. Spoon a generous tablespoon of soured cream into the centre of each bowl and finish with a few extra snipped chives if you have them.About 2 min
Tips
- Cooking half the chives into the soup and adding the rest raw at the end gives you two distinct flavour layers — sweet and grassy from the cooked ones, bright and sharp from the fresh ones.
- For a vichyssoise-style chilled version, cool the blended soup completely in the fridge (at least 2 hours), then stir through the raw chives just before serving cold with a swirl of cream.
- Floury potatoes are essential here — waxy varieties like Charlotte won't break down properly and you'll get a gluey texture.
Ring the changes
- Crisp up 100g of smoked streaky bacon and scatter over the top instead of soured cream for a heartier, more substantial bowl.
- Stir in 80g of mature Cheddar after blending for a Welsh rarebit-inspired version.
Keeping it
Cool completely and refrigerate for up to 3 days. Reheat gently without boiling. Freezes well for up to 2 months — freeze before adding the final raw chives, then add them fresh when reheating.
In the app this recipe finds you
Log what you've picked and GrowMore CookMore matches it to 1,918 more recipes like this one, tells you what's ready before the frost gets it, and keeps the freezer honest. Free to start.
More from the same crop
A silky, vivid green chive butter sauce that would be worth making just to eat with a spoon, here spooned generously over crisp-skinned pan-fried trout fillets. The sauce uses a whole bunch of chives blended into the butter, so the flavour is bold and the colour is stunning. This is proper weeknight cooking that feels like a restaurant meal.
22 min · easy · ChivesThese gyoza-style dumplings are packed with a fragrant filling of minced pork and a very generous amount of fresh chives — the chive flavour is bold, grassy and absolutely central to the whole thing. They're pan-fried to a golden crisp base then steamed in the pan to cook through, giving you that satisfying contrast of textures. It is a proper weeknight project that comes together in under 30 minutes if you use ready-made dumpling wrappers.
30 min · easy · Chives
Allotment keeper in the North East of England, the voice behind the Tony C Smith YouTube channel, and the gardener who built GrowMore CookMore. Club numbers on this page update as members log their plots. Last updated 4 April 2026.