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A soul-warming Moroccan sweet potato lentil soup recipe. This soup is made in the slow cooker and requires hardly any work at all. Plus, it makes the whole house smell warm and cozy!
SOUP TIME.
Which, in my very humble opinion is the best kind of time there is. Unless it’s Chocolate Chip Cookie time, which, goes without saying, is obviously better.
And which obviously this is NOT. Ahem, what? Where were we? Detoxing.
That’s right.
Today, I’m bringing you this Moroccan-style detox lentil soup loaded with all the goodness straight from your refrigerator plus pantry with tons of soul-warming spices to brighten up these cold, cold winter days.
Now that’s what I’m talking about.
This Moroccan-inspired sweet potato and lentil soup is WARMING. Warming in a very pleasant way. We aren’t talking spicy – I mean spiced. To perfection. Along with an abundance of vegetables, we’ve got ground coriander, cumin, curry powder, paprika, cinnamon, turmeric, and nutmeg in the mix. So there’s plenty of flavor that the lentils and sweet potatoes will soak up.
Did I mention it also happens to be freezer-friendly since we don’t have a noodle situation here. It’s also budget-friendly because lentils are a great way to pack in fiber and protein without breaking the bank.
And it just happens to be around 250 calories a serving. So the leftovers can go into portions in the freezer for meal prep when you need a quick lunch with tons of veggies.
Ingredients for Sweet Potato Lentil Soup
- Sweet Potatoes: we’ll use about 1 pound of sweet potatoes to the ¾-1 pound of lentils in this recipe. Peel and cube the potatoes into small pieces so that they cook up in roughly the same amount of time as the brown lentils.
- Carrots, Onions, and Celery: The trinity for a good bowl of soup! Feel free to use a store-bought mirepoix mix if you’d like as this recipe calls for equal parts of each.
- Red Bell Pepper: Adds natural sweetness to the pot of soup along with the ground cinnamon.
- Garlic: you’ll need a handful of cloves for this recipe. I opt to add fresh pressed garlic as it has a more potent flavor. Jar-lic works too but you’ll probably need a little over 2 tablespoons to give it that same taste.
- Lentils: You’ll need brown or green lentils for this recipe. I typically use red lentils for my Turkish Red Lentil Soup recipe or my Indian Style Red Lentil Dal Soup along with some coconut milk, but since we’re loading this into the slow cooker and letting it simmer away, the texture would become too mushy. With the longer cooking time, brown or green lentils work better for this particular recipe.
- Spices: You’ll need some ground coriander, cumin, curry powder, smoked paprika, ground cinnamon, ground turmeric, and nutmeg. Feel free to swap the paprika or chili powder, or add both if you want the smoke and the heat.
- Broth: feel free to use vegetable broth or chicken broth depending on whether you need this recipe to be vegan-friendly or not.
- Baby Spinach: I personally love baby spinach for this recipe, but feel free to swap it with kale if that’s what you like or if that’s what you have on hand.
- Lemons: Fresh lemon wedges really brighten up the soup. Finish he soup with the lemon or squeeze into individual bowls if you’d like.
I made this tonight and it turned out fantastic! I will definitely be putting this in my soup rotation.
Making Sweet Potato Soup
- Load it all up. Seriously, add everything but the baby spinach and lemon juice to the slow cooker. You can cook tis on high for 4-6 hours or low for 6-8 hours. Keep in mind that all slow cookers are different, so yours may take more or less time than what is listed. Check for doneness after the first 2-3 hours and then adjust as needed.
- Blend it up. Check to see if the soup is done my piercing the sweet potatoes with a sharp knife. The knife should go through easily without needing much force. Press the lentils down using a spoon to see if they mash easily. When done, transfer half of the soup mixture to a blend and pulse until smooth-ish. Stir this backing the soup pot and then add the baby spinach and lemon juice. Cover and let the soup hand out for 30 minutes or until the spinach wilts down.
- Adjust and serve. Taste and adjust the soup to your liking. You might need additional salt, black pepper, or more curry powder to your liking. You might also need another splash of broth depending on how much liquid the ingredient absorbed while cooking. Serve with whipped yogurt, fried bread, and fresh herbs on top. Enjoy!
Other vegetarian-friendly soup recipes
- Secret Ingredient Tomato Basil Soup
- Luxurious Turkish Lentil Soup
- Cheesy Rice and Black Bean Soup
- Roasted Honeynut Squash Soup
- Roasted Garlic Potato Soup
- Chipotle Butternut Squash Chili
Moroccan Sweet Potato Lentil Soup (Slow Cooker)
Equipment
Ingredients
- 1 pound sweet potatoes peeled and cubed into small pieces
- 1 cup carrots chopped
- 1 cup onions chopped
- 1 cup celery chopped
- 1 red bell pepper diced
- 6 cloves garlic minced or pressed
- 1 ½ cups green or brown lentils rinsed and picked over
- 1 ½ teaspoon ground coriander
- 1 ½ teaspoon cumin powder
- 1 teaspoon curry powder or more to taste
- ½ teaspoon smoked paprika
- ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
- ½ teaspoon ground turmeric
- ⅛ teaspoon ground nutmeg
- 6-7 cups low sodium stock vegetable or chicken
- 2 ½ cups baby spinach roughly chopped
- ¼ cup lemon juice or lemon wedges for serving
Instructions
- Place the sweet potatoes, carrots, onions, celery, red bell pepper, garlic, lentils, spices, and 6 cups of broth into a slow cooker. Cover and cook on the low setting for 6-8 hours or on high for 4-6 hours.
- Check the lentils for doneness. If you're lentils have been in the pantry for a while, note that they'll take a bit longer to cook through.
- Place half the soup into a blender along with a little additional broth (½ cup or so) and blend till smoothish. Alternately, you can use an immersion blender directly in the slow cooker but be sure to not blend all of the soup if you want it to have a chunkier texture.
- Add the puree back into the slow cooker. Stir in the baby spinach and lemon juice. Cover the slow cooker, unplug it, and allow the ingredients to just hang out for 30 minutes or so until the spinach wilts down.
- Season with salt, pepper and curry powder to taste as desired. Thin with additional broth to desired consistency.
- Serve warm with whipped greek yogurt, fried pita bread, and tons of fresh herbs (parsley or cilantro) on top!
Notes
- Add more protein: You can sauté 1 pound of ground lamb, beef, chicken, or turkey and add it in with all the other ingredients to the slow cooker for a more protein-filled meal – note that you may need a little bit more of each of the seasonings to balance flavors when adding protein.
Nutrition
Nutrition information is automatically calculated, so should only be used as an approximation.
Like This? Leave a comment & rating below!
Hi 🙂 I just ran across your blog and this soup looks delicious. I noticed a lot of spices in they recipe. Would you consider this soup to be spicy (spicy in terms of mild vs medium heat). Thank you!
We found it to be mild Caitlyn, but this really depends on the kind of curry powder you use. Feel free to cut it back to your preference 🙂
I didn’t find it spicy at all. I used the curry powder mix from Trader Joe’s for reference. I thought it was a little odd that this recipe doesn’t call for salt up front, so I added a 1/2 teaspoon. Also, I sauteed the onion/garlic/carrots/celery/spices in my Instant Pot pressure cooker and then threw in the rest of the ingredients, cooked for 4m manual. For others thinking of making this, this soup TASTES AMAZING! Love it with the lemon juice at the end, but it tastes great without it as well. And I know it will taste even better tomorrow like most soups do. definitely try it out!
Oh this looks so good! I have a huge jar of lentils that I’ve been wanting to do something fun with. I love the layout of your recipe too. Is it part of your blog’s theme or do you use something different?
Hi Julie! Thanks so much! Yes it’s part of a custom theme our designer made for us. Feel free to shoot me an email if you’re interested and I can put you in touch with her 🙂
Does this soup freeze well? I can’t wait to make it! Thanks
I have a gizmo that vacuum packs, and I simply made a huge load and froze two packages (don’t turn on the vacuum when you seal the bags).
I just bought everything to make this. I found it on Pinterest earlier this week. I imagine I will love it!
Hope it’s even better than you imagine 🙂
Loved the recipe; thanks for sharing!
I made mine using sweated onion with butter and cooked squash instead of sweet potato. My only question involves the recipe vs the pictures. Your picture looks to have parsley flakes and possibly a red serrano pepper or cherry pepper on top. Also is that an oil or the lemon juice in the image? Were these just for eye-candy or did they not work out and thus were omitted from the recipe?
Thanks, so much!!
Oops, forgot to mention I used my pressure cooker, too. 1 hour on high 🙂
All of the garnishes were purely for picture purposes but feel free to add them to your bowl as well if you’d like! I used chopped parsley, a drizzle of olive oil and a sliced red jalapeño.
Do not have a slow cooker, so sauted the vegetables and added rest of ingredients except lentils. Cooked till tender then added a can of drained lentils and half a package of frozen spinach, thawed. Everyone loved it.
This sounds delicious! Question though. What type of curry powder do you use? Red, yellow?
I apologize Dawn, I thought I had already answered this! I used yellow curry powder.
We live in Australia , so summer now , in fact over 100 degs f right now ! I will be making this delicious sounding soup in cooler weather & will pass on to vegan daughter in law ! Thank you !
I made the recipe to a tee, and thought it was very bland. Definitely missing something(s). Unfortunately, I have a lot to eat–I hate the idea of wasting what remains, but then again, I just don’t know how I can finish it being a serious foodie.
Thanks for your feedback, Sierra. With so much garlic and many different seasonings, my intention for this soup was for it to be anything but ‘bland’. If you’d like, you can always doctor the remaining soup with additional curry powder/seasonings or cayenne pepper to your preference.
As another self-proclaimed serious foodie, I would definitely not call this bland. I added a little extra curry powder and smoked paprika at the end, and a pinch of cayenne, and our whole family loved it. Perhaps it was just not to your tastes. And I love that I can feel good about eating it, too! Thanks for the recipe.
Old or stale spices will make a meal taste bland. Just in case anyone reading through the comments has this same problem with any meals. I remember reading that tip and it’s helped me so much in my cooking.
Making it now. What can I sub for curry powder?
The curry powder is a crucial ingredient in this recipe, I unfortunately cannot suggest an alternate ingredient that wouldn’t change the taste. Please use your best judgement.
I’m a bit late, but curry powder is often the same as garam masala, or masala spice mixes, and thus the ingredients are a mix of various other spices such as black cardamom, yellow cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, bay leaves, chili pepper, coriander, sichuan pepper, anistar/star anise, fennel seeds, cumin seeds, cloves, kalapsi, tumeric, black mustard seed, salt, garlic granules, saffron, nigella sativa, amchoor, or pomegranate powder. Not all mixes will have all of these, but most of them seem to have cardamom, turmeric, cinnamon, chili pepper and cumin.
Alton Brown did an episode called The Curious Case of Curry which talks about this, and I’ve just figured this out by reading the bottles and bags at various spice stores. Sometimes I think the mixes are far more expensive than buying whole seeds/pods/flowers or just separate bits and pieces.
Hi! Made this tonight and it was DELICIOUS! Thank you so much! I wanted to make a note in case there are other forgetful cooks like me out there. I did this on the stovetop using brown lentils that had definitely been in pantry a while. I let it cook for about 1.5 hours and it was perfect. You could probably even cook it less than that. Just in case you don’t have time to slow cook, this is all good as a quick cook.
Ok, this looks seriously yummy. I’ve made a pig pot of lentil soup before and it was perfection so I think I’m going to try this one tonight! I might add in some protein because….well i just always have to have a bit of that 🙂
Question though! I have a huge stock of black lentils in my cabinet – in my experience, they take longer to cook (if my memory serves me right). You think I can sub out the brown for the black?
Glad to hear you’ve decided to give this recipe a try, Amy! I’m not too sure about swapping the brown lentils for black ones. Like you said, I do think they’d take a little longer to cook and I feel they’d need at least a solid 8 hours on low (if not longer). Do let me know how it goes if you decide to give it a try 🙂
Woke up at 4:00am and could not get back to sleep so I prepped the soup, put in crock pot AND this is the best soup ever! You are right, the house smelled great , dinner ready when we got home and it was fantastic thank you for the recipe. Plenty of left overs for lunch at the office!
Glad to hear you enjoyed the soup, Sheri! Thanks for taking the time to comment 🙂
So good! Love how the lemon juice at the end sharpens it up. It was stew on day 2.
A little water or addition broth should bring it back to that ‘soupy’ consistency 🙂
Would this recipe work with red lentils?
I’m unsure Alexandra. I feel with the red lentils you run the risk of them overcooking in the time listed. If you decide to give it a try, i’d love to know how it went!
We made this yesterday for a casual Sunday supper with the family. We prepped the vegetables the evening before to cut down the morning prep time. Rather than cook the spinach at the end, it was served (separately) with steamed brown rice to be added to the soup bowls as desired. This was delicious and a big hit with the group. This is a healthy and flavorful soup and perfect on a cold day!
OH WOW! I cannot wait to try this recipe. Will def make it this week. I love all the spices in it!
I live in Dallas, TX – where are you guys? I just connected with you on social media. 🙂 Awesome blog! <3
Well hello! I apologize, I thought I had already answered your message! We’re in Houston, so not far from you at all! Thank you so much for the follow and for all your kind words! Hope you enjoy the soup! 🙂
What are the red sliced peppers on top? It’s on the menus for this week! Can’t wait!
Just red jalapeño peppers sliced for pictures!
I just made this recipe and it is delicious. My husband added a tablespoon of sour cream since he had to make sure it wasn’t too healthy. It is just perfect.
It’s funny you say that Christine, my husband does the same thing. Glad to hear it was enjoyed though! Thanks for taking the time to comment! 🙂
I noticed your recipe has an error that might confuse your readers.
Under your Directions – Item 1. the cooking level is “Low” for the 4-6Hr time duration.
You stated in your description of the recipe above that the cooking level should be set on “High” for this cooking time.
Thanks for catching that Michael!