My Famous Sustainable Silver Beet Soup

This recipe has been asked for a few times and is the result of having too much silver beet in my garden. Silver beet is the NZ name for Swiss chard and is very popular here. When we were kids we used to have to drink the silver beet water that the vegetable was cooked in because it made you strong. Must have worked as I can now pick up large bundles of silver beet from my garden. After trying all sorts of things, this is probably the best thing to do with a surplus.

Refervata Soup

8 big leaves of silver beet
garlic, three big cloves
2 onions
some oil for cooking
1 litre of water
about 4 rashers of bacon
a big stalk of celery
two tins of chickpeas
one tin of Watties baked beans
one tin of tomatoes
one packet of powdered onion soup
three cups chicken stock
salt and pepper to taste


Wash the silver beet leaves and cut off the white part of the stalk. Discard half the stalks but chop up the rest into strips. Boil the water and plunge the leaves, one by one, uncut but folded OK, into the boiling water. Keep a slow boil going for about 12 minutes. The water should be nice and green and will be the soup basis later. When boiling time up, pour off the green water into big pot and save the limp leaves to cool. I flatten the leaves out onto a breadboard or big plate and take outside which is always cool here in Dunedin. Takes me about 20 minutes before I can handle the cooled leaves.
Meanwhile, put some oil into a deep frying pan. Add the garlic and onions, both chopped. Add too the chopped up stalks of half the silver beet. Chop up the celery too and add it in at this stage. Stir round until the onions are sweated. Now add the chopped bacon and stir around with the garlic, onions, celery, silver beet stalks and oil until bacon starts to look a bit cooked. About 5 minutes. Now all the tinned products get added. Put in the drained chickpeas, the tin of tomatoes with liquid, the tin of baked beans. Stir around until bubbly then simmer for 5 minutes. Pour all the contents of the frying pan into the green silver beet water that's in a big pot. Turn on heat to start simmering. By now the silver beet leaves will be getting nice and cool and limp. On a chopping board, push the leaves with your hands into a mound like a load of bread.

With a sharp knife cut parallel slices through it going one direction. Then make similar cuts at right angles. The idea here is to produce little bits of silver beet about the size of a big postage stamp. Now put the chopped up silver beet into the big pot with all the other ingredients and give the soup a stir. Finally we add some stock. First add three cups of chicken stock, then make the powdered soup up in a cup with a fork and about 200 ml of water. Stir into the soup. That's it. Stir and simmer for about 30 minutes. I taste and add pepper and salt as I go. Serve with chunks of crunchy bread on a cold day. It keeps very well as befits a soup named after the Portuguese word "refervata" which means "reboiled".

I have made this for vegetarians. Just miss out, or substitute for, the bacon and put in vegetable stock instead of the chicken stock. I'm sure other variations are possible. I've tried it with potatoes, carrots, grated root vegetables, black beans and missing out the celery or stalks, but I keep coming back to the old favorite version above.