Soup Savvy
By Sidonie Maroon, Culinary Educator for The Food Co-op
I know I’ve done my job when the first reaction to a spoonful of soup is a long sigh with closed eyes and a smile.The more you make wonderful soup, the more you will find your own style and techniques. I make soup differently than I did forty years ago, and yes, I have that many years of broth under my belt.
Soup Parts
Nowadays, I make separate soup components and bring them together before serving. I make a broth or stock, roast alliums and root vegetables, or stew meat. I’ll have an Instant Pot, Rice Cooker, and a large toaster oven going, and forgo the stovetop. When everything is done, I put together only as much soup as we’ll eat, and save the rest for other meals. I season the soup at the end, adding the correct amounts of salt and acid. Freshly ground spices are added to the roasting veggies and other flavors go into the broth. This is a method I honed for making gallons of soup professionally for several years.
Flavor Alchemy
Salt: don’t fear good quality sea salt. Salt opens up the palette so we can taste the flavors of the food. Use about 1 teaspoon per quart of liquid. Acid: An acid, like apple cider vinegar or lemon, allows the food’s inherent flavors to come forward. Use 1 tablespoon per quart of liquid, when you adjust and correct the soup before serving. Umami: Roasting vegetables instead of simmering increases their depths of flavor and intensifies their sweet qualities. Umami powerhouses: Fish sauce, tomato paste, dried mushrooms, beef. Heat: A touch of heat, like black pepper, red pepper flakes, or cayenne, makes the tongue do a double take, and circle back around. Sweet: Added sweetness will make a soup taste balanced and rounded. Use 1 to 3 teaspoons per quart of liquid.
The best soups will taste in several flavor directions at once: sweet, salty, sour, heat, umami, and just a touch of bitter. The flavor directions should enhance the eating experience but not overpower it.
Broth
Make a broth that matches the soup. Use the peelings, tops, bottoms, and stems of the soup veggies as your base. This practice creates another flavor dimension, increases nutrition, and cuts down on waste.
Add Dimension
Spice the soup in two layers. Add whole spices and dried herbs to the stock, and add ground spices and fresh herbs at the end with the salt and acid. The whole spices in the stock create a subtle depth, and the ground spices, and fresh herbs, an aromatic punch. Think Pho.
Hit deep, medium and high flavor notes
Deep like dried chilies, medium like cumin, high like fresh cilantro. Use all parts of the plant — stems, roots, leaves, fruits and seeds. Use combinations of techniques in one soup: roast, saute, simmer, or slow cook. This allows flavor to develop in different ways, and then come together. Color matters, texture matters, in season matters, timing matters. It all matters for excellent soup. But it doesn’t have to be complicated, just care. Care and Passion make the best soups.
Soup Serious
If you’re serious about soup, consider studying the recipes of great soup makers. I would start with books like: “Cook’s Encyclopedia of Soup” by Debra Mayhew, “400 soups” by Anne Sheasby, and “All Time Best Soups” by Cook’s Illustrated.
Wouldn’t it be a kick?
There are so many fabulous soups from around the globe for every taste and occasion: rich and creamy, hearty, one-pot-meals, vegetarian and carnivore extravaganzas. I love Mulligatawny, Pozole, Tom Yum, Minestrone, Bouillabaisse and New England Clam Chowder. Each has a unique set of ingredients, preparation and best of all, reflects the diversity of local cultures. Wouldn’t it be a kick to spend the rest of the winter making soups from around the world?
Silky Roasted Root Soup
makes 2 ½ quarts
A luscious velvet soup made with roasted roots and served with horseradish cream
For Roasting
1 medium beet, peeled and chopped into a medium dice
1 medium parsnips, cut into a medium dice
2 cups peeled celeriac root, cut into a medium dice
2 medium carrots, peeled and chopped into a medium dice
1 medium onion, chopped into a medium dice
1 medium cooking apple, chopped into a medium dice
2 tablespoons olive oil
For Broth
2 quarts water
All the peels, tops and ends of the vegetables, excluding the onion and garlic skins
Stems from one bunch of parsley and mince the leaves for the garnish
Plus:
4 cloves garlic crushed without peels
4 slices fresh ginger, including peels
2 teaspoons dried thyme
¼ teaspoon whole allspice berries
1 teaspoon whole coriander seed
¼ teaspoon black peppercorns
For Seasoning
Grind together in a spice or coffee grinder and sift
½ teaspoon caraway seed
1 teaspoon fennel seed
1 teaspoon dill seed
For Finishing
2 ½ teaspoon sea salt or to taste
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar or to taste
Horseradish cream (recipe follows)
Preheat the oven to 425 F. Place the chopped vegetables on a large parchment paper lined baking sheet, and rub with olive oil. Roast them for 30 minutes, then stir and continue roasting until they’re sweet about 10 to 15 minutes more.
Add all the broth ingredients to a soup pot, bring to a boil and turn to a simmer until the roasting veggies are done. Strain the broth.
In batches, puree the broth and roasted vegetables together in a blender, or food processor.
Grind the spices together in a spice or coffee grinder and sift. Add the spices to the soup with the salt and vinegar.
Make the horseradish cream and mince the parsley.
To serve: Heat before serving only as much soup as you will need. Add minced parsley leaves with dollops of horseradish cream
Horseradish Cream
Blend:
1 cup sour cream
1 tablespoons prepared horseradish sauce
Juice of one lemon
½ teaspoon sea salt
Sage Soup Advice
A good way to live within your food budget, practice kitchen skills, and hone your inner gourmet is to make soup. There’s a lot of artistry and craft that goes into a delicious soup, and I could write a book on soup philosophy, but we only have space for a few sage pieces of advice.
Study
Challenge yourself to discover soups from other parts of the world and top-notch chefs. What techniques do they use? When do they eat soup? What lessons can you incorporate into your cooking? Checking out cookbooks from the library is a good place to start. Try reading books or watching shows you can linger over. It’s my experience that online recipes tend to dumb down cooking and not include the finer details and deeper processes. For the best soup education—seek the real deal.
Broths and stock are easy to make and freeze
I keep a bag in the fridge with vegetable scraps and bones — squash guts, peelings, ends of celery, carrot tops. For a broth, I put them in the Instant pot with 2 quarts of water and set it to high pressure for 30 minutes with a natural release. For a stock, I gather bones and vegetable scraps and again use the Instant pot, this time set to high pressure for 2 hours with a natural release. When done, I strain, refrigerate or freeze. I keep any fats that harden after cooling, to use when sauteing or roasting ingredients for my soup.
Broth vs Stock
Although it alliterates, technically, there is no such thing as bone broth. A broth is an infusion of vegetables, or vegetables and meats, usually done within 30 minutes and provides a light, flavorful backdrop to soup. In contrast, a stock is a long simmering combination of vegetables, meats and bones. It’s usually reduced and is deeply flavorful with gelatin.
Seasonal Soups
Soups have their seasons, depending on available local produce. We look forward to cooling gazpacho in the summer, light asparagus puree in the spring, and creamy pumpkin soups in the fall. Keeping with the seasons also helps us stay out of the habit of making the same soups over and over.
Soup Genres
What soups do you prefer — chilled, light and refreshing, spicy, creamy vegetable, chunky vegetable, winter warming, legume, noodle, tofu, poultry, meat, fish, seafood, egg and cheese, one pot?
Touch Taste Smell
The artistry of soup is both in the cooking and how you serve it. Keep it colorful, make sure it smells amazing, and use contrasting garnishes. Try chopped herbs, contrasting crunchy seeds and nuts, croutons, creams, cheeses. Use differently shaped bowls, some shallow or deep depending on the style of soup.
Flavor Builders
Make homemade stock, especially for your soup.
Roast some of your vegetables for deeper flavors.
Grind whole spices
Chop up fresh herbs. They’re easy to grow at home.
Find quality sea salt and have a variety of acids and vinegars to choose from.
Include something hot and something sweet. I like onions and a little cayenne pepper. Taste and correct before serving.
Thickening Soups
Thicken Soups like sauces with a roux or beurre manié, egg yolks, or with other starches like potato. Soups from Spain or Mexico use nuts and seeds to thicken. Vegetable and legume soups thicken with the natural starchiness of potatoes, squashes, root vegetables, lentils or beans.
Classic French Liaisons
Liaison: binding the liquids and solids in a sauce.
Roux thickens sauces, soups and stews, and provides the base to add other ingredients. Make it with a one-to-one ratio, by weight, of flour and fat. Whisk the flour into melted fat or oil on the stovetop, and blend until smooth and browned. Depending on how long they’re browned, a roux is white, blond (darker) or brown. The fats used are commonly butter, bacon drippings or lard. Beurre manié is French for “kneaded butter”. It’s made with equal parts of soft butter and flour, and is used to thicken soups and sauces. When kneaded together, the flour particles are coated in butter. When they’re whisked into hot broth — voilà the butter melts, releasing the flour without lumps.
My favorite thickeners
Coconut cream, red lentils, potato starch, vegetable purees, ground cashews.
Sweet Potato and Tart Apple Soup
Instant Pot and Oven Roasted
Makes 6 cups
A recipe for Yam and Apple Soup in “The Chesapeake Bay Cookbook” by John Shields intrigued me. A fine Eastern Shore duo, it read. Indeed! A fine duo for showcasing my favorite technique of making a soup’s broth out of its scraps. And an example of adding roasted flavors to soup. I rewrote the recipe, adding tart apple, spices, roasting and designer broth, but kept the whipped cream topping with maple syrup and grated nutmeg. Why ever not! It’s a delightful bright creamy soup that’ll become a family favorite.
Roasting
⅓ cup unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1 medium onion, chopped
1 large red garnet sweet potato, peeled and chopped (about 3 cups) (reserve peels and ends)
1 medium tart apple, Pink Lady or Granny Smith, peeled, cored and chopped (reserve peels and core removing the seeds)
¾ teaspoon fine sea salt
Broth
4 cups water
Sweet potato peels and ends
Apple peels and core with seeds removed
1 medium onion, chopped
¼ teaspoon black peppercorns
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3 allspice berries, crushed
3 slices fresh ginger (¼ inch thick)
2 teaspoons fennel seed
¾ teaspoon fine sea salt
2 bay leaves
Finishing
2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar or to taste
½ teaspoon flaked sea salt
2 tablespoons maple syrup
Optional Garnish
Freshly grated nutmeg
2 cups lightly whipped cream flavored with 2 tablespoons maple syrup
Beginning
Prep all the produce, creating the broth ingredients as you prepare the roasting ingredients. Measure out the spices. To make the soup, you’ll use both the oven and Instant Pot and then puree the roasted produce and broth together.
Broth
Add all the broth ingredients to the pot. Make sure the Instant Pot seal is in place and put the lid on. Set to the broth cycle or high pressure for 30 minutes with a natural release. After the cycle is complete, strain the broth through a sieve into the bender jar.
Roasting
Preheat the oven to 425 F. Lay all the roasting ingredients on a large parchment paper lined baking sheet. Dab with the butter and sprinkle with salt. Roast for 20 minutes. Stir and continue to roast for another 20 minutes or until soft. Be careful not to let the food on the edges burn. Lift the parchment paper and slide the roasted produce into the blender jar with the broth. Puree at a high speed until smooth.
Finishing
Bring the soup back up to serving temperature in the Instant Pot. Taste and add the finishing ingredients as needed.
Serve the soup hot with dollops of whipped cream and grated nutmeg.
Roasted Crimini Chowder in Delicata Broth
For Chowder
¼ cup unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1 lb cremini mushrooms, thinly sliced
2 medium yellow onions, chopped
4 medium carrots, cut into thin sticks and then a medium dice
2 stalks celery, cut into thin sticks and then a medium dice
6 cloves garlic, minced wit inner growing stem removed
2 teaspoons dried thyme
¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 lb russet potatoes, peeled and cut into a medium dice
For Broth
Scraps and peelings from the vegetables, but not the papery parts of the onions.
2 bay leaves
1 whole delicata squash, roughly cut up, include the skin and seeds
1 quart chicken broth, homemade preferred
1 teaspoon sea salt
To Finish
½ cup cold water
2 tablespoons potato starch, cornstarch will work
2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar
Roast the mushrooms 425 F , on a parchment lined baking sheet, for 20 minutes. Pour off the mushroom liquids and reserve. Roast for another 8 minutes or until meaty and rich tasting.
On another parchment lined baking sheet, roast the other vegetables with the butter, thyme, salt and red pepper flakes sprinkled over them. They should all be about the same size to roast evenly. Roast them for 20 minutes, stir and continue to roast for another 15 to 20 minutes.
While the vegetables are roasting, simmer the broth together in a soup pot for 30 minutes. I used my Instant Pot on the broth cycle. Strain the broth.
In a small liquid measure, make a slurry by adding ½ cup water to 2 tablespoons potato starch. Slowly add to the strained broth. Blend the broth and slurry together in a blender at high speed.
Add roasted veggies (not mushrooms) and blended broth together in the soup pot. Remove two cups of veggies and broth, blend them together and return the puree to the pot. Add the mushrooms, reserved juices and vinegar. Stir and taste.
Roasted Carrot Bisque with Coconut and Citrus
Makes 1 quart
Roasting Ingredients
2 tablespoons avocado oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 inch nub fresh ginger, unpeeled, minced
1 inch nub fresh turmeric, unpeeled, minced
3 cloves garlic, minced
6 medium carrots, unpeeled, chopped
1 tablespoon garam masala, recipe below
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 teaspoon dried thyme
Finishing Ingredients
14-ounce can full fat coconut milk
Juice and zest of one medium lemon
Juice and zest of one medium orange
Fried Topping Ingredients
2 tablespoons avocado oil
⅓ cup unsweetened wide coconut flakes
¼ cup dates
¼ cup raw cashews
¼ cup pumpkin seeds
sprinkle of flaked sea salt
1 teaspoon coconut sugar
Grind spices together for garam masala. Preheat the oven to 425 F line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Toss all the roasting ingredients together with the oil, salt and spices. Roast for 25 minutes. Stir and roast for another 20 minutes.
In a high-powered blender, puree the roasted ingredients with coconut milk and citrus until smooth. Taste and correct as needed.
While the carrots roast, make the fried topping. Using a medium to medium high heat, warm the ghee or oil in a heavy-bottomed frying pan. Add the toppings and fry, stirring and watching closely until toasty, about 4 minutes. Pulse them together in a food processor, until medium fine, about 10 pulses. Serve with bisque, or generously add to the top of the individual portions.
Garam Masala
Grind together and store in a jar to use as needed
2 tablespoons coriander seeds
1 tablespoon cumin seeds
½ teaspoon allspice berries
1 teaspoon green cardamom pods with hulls removed
2 dried bay leaves
1 teaspoon red pepper powder
2 teaspoons cinnamon
Converting Instant Pot Soup Recipes to Stove Top Methods
Converting Instant Pot soup recipes to conventional stove top methods is a great way to enjoy delicious soups without needing a pressure cooker. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you with the conversion process, along with some useful tips and techniques:
Step 1: Adjust Cooking Time - Instant Pot cooking times are typically shorter due to the pressure cooking method. When converting to stove top, increase the cooking time to ensure that the ingredients are fully cooked and flavors are well developed.
Step 2: Sauté Ingredients - Start by sautéing the aromatics and vegetables in a large pot or Dutch oven over medium heat. This helps to develop rich flavors and aromas, similar to the sauté function in the Instant Pot.
Step 3: Add Liquid and Ingredients - Once the vegetables are sautéed, add the broth, water, and any other liquid ingredients indicated in the recipe. Then, add the remaining ingredients such as meat, beans, pasta, or rice.
Step 4: Adjust Seasonings - Adjust the seasonings as needed. Taste the soup and add salt, pepper, herbs, and spices according to your preference. Remember that flavors may intensify during longer stove top cooking times.
Step 5: Simmer and Cook - Bring the soup to a boil, then reduce the heat to a gentle simmer. Cover the pot partially with a lid and let the soup cook for the adjusted time indicated in the recipe.
Step 6: Monitor and Stir - Stir the soup occasionally to prevent sticking and ensure even cooking. Keep an eye on the liquid level and add more broth or water if needed.
Step 7: Test for Doneness by testing the tenderness of vegetables, meat, or other ingredients. Adjust the cooking time if needed.
Tips and Techniques
Adjust Cooking Times: Stove top cooking times will vary depending on the recipe. Be prepared to adjust and monitor the cooking process as needed.
Use a Timer: Use a kitchen timer or set a timer on your phone to keep track of the cooking time. This will help prevent overcooking or undercooking.
Simmering Techniques: For soups that require long simmering times, consider using a heat diffuser to distribute heat evenly and prevent scorching.
Flavor Development: Stove top cooking allows for longer flavor development. Take advantage of this by adding fresh herbs and spices towards the end of cooking for a burst of fresh flavor.
Adjust Liquid Levels: Stove top cooking may require more liquid than pressure cooking. Add more broth or water if necessary to maintain the desired consistency.
By following these steps and tips, you can easily convert Instant Pot soup recipes to conventional stove top methods and enjoy delicious homemade soups with ease.
