I know you want to get right to the recipes — don’t worry, this is a short chapter. Here I pulled together some general comments and tips about making soup, so I wouldn’t bore you by repeating them over and over later on. Some of these ideas may already be in your repertoire, but I hope you’ll find a few new things too.
You already know many of the wonderful things about soup:
It’s healthy. With a strong reliance on vegetables and protein-rich legumes like beans and lentils, relatively small amounts of meat, and almost no fat, soup is a nutrition lollapalooza. It’s also a great way to sneak veggies into kids’ diets.
It’s inexpensive. Soup is a particularly delicious way to feed lots of people.
It’s easy. Sophisticated culinary techniques are not needed. In fact, I can hardly think of any soup recipe that requires a special skill; many can be prepared by children (assuming an adult supervises the knife work).
It’s versatile. Soup for lunch. Soup for supper. Soup for a crowd. Soup for a party. Soup for unexpected visitors — I’m betting you can create something delicious from your pantry and fridge in short order.
It’s easy to expand. The recipes in this book are planned for 6 to 8 servings, because I know you’ll want to make some for your regular family meals. But almost all of them — almost all soups, really — can easily be expanded to feed a crowd. You may not always want to double the amount of the more expensive ingredients (and it hardly ever matters), and you probably should increase the spices and herbs incrementally, tasting as you go, but in other respects, just double or triple the ingredients. In fact, even if you’re not cooking for a crowd, you might want to make a double batch and freeze half. If you do, here’s a tip from Sonia in Portland (page 81): “Separate the solids from the liquids before freezing. When reheating, start with the liquids, and then add the solids. This prevents the solids from getting overcooked.”
It’s a great use for leftovers. A little bit of pot roast, a cupful of mashed potatoes, half a zucchini, two tomatoes that won’t last another day . . . just about anything can be the start of a wonderful soup. Just add imagination, and stir.
It’s forgiving. Precise measurements hardly ever matter. In fact, many great cooks don’t even bother.
It’s flexible. Soup nicely lends itself to improvisation. Don’t have kale? Use spinach. Weather unexpectedly warm? Many hot soups are also good cold. Don’t like something? Leave it out. I confess — I cannot abide the taste of cooked celery, so when it shows up in any recipe I just ignore it. And you can turn just about any vegetable into a nutritious soup in a jiffy; for example, see Cream of Anything Green Soup (page 32).
It’s easy to convert for vegetarians. Leave out the meat and substitute vegetable broth or plain water for the stock.
It’s delicious.
It warms your soul. For all the above reasons, plus one more: it makes tangible the many meanings of “community.” Read Martha Bayne’s eloquent note about the “community-built nature of soup” (page 140).
I’m guessing that you already have on hand many of the staples — such as onions, garlic, and olive oil — for making soup on the spur of the moment. Check over this list for ingredients you might not have thought of:
In addition to the pantry, look to your fridge. Several staples that need refrigeration will help you make a delicious impromptu soup. Here are a few I try always to keep on hand:
And of course we haven’t said anything about herbs and spices. But that’s another book, and I’m sure you have a good selection in your cupboards, ready to explore.
People who like to make soup tend to be especially ingenious and resourceful. Here are a few shortcuts, to go with the ones you no doubt have already discovered:
True to the improvisational nature of soup, the stock that serves as its liquid basis is very much a product of a cook’s ingenuity and thriftiness, more than it is of a specific recipe. I know that will seem heretical to some serious chefs, those folks who purchase veal bones just for stock, for instance. Instead, let’s talk about what you can easily and realistically do.
When you work with fresh vegetables, save the trimmings. Carrot scrapings, potato peels, the leafy tops of celery, the stalks of broccoli, leek tops (leaves), onion peels — all that stuff. Toss them around in a bowl with a small amount of olive oil and roast in a 4000F oven for about 10 minutes. Run the whole thing through your blender with a little water, strain, and freeze. Don’t forget to label. Do this a few times, and you have the basis for a wonderful vegetarian stock.
For any entrée that starts with a cut of meat that has bones, cut away the bones first. Sauté them in vegetable oil until very well browned, then add water (or tomato juice, or wine, or a mixture) and a couple of bay leaves and simmer for at least an hour (a slow cooker works well here). Strain off and reserve the liquid, set it in the refrigerator until cool, and remove the fat after it congeals on the top.
Roasting a chicken or turkey for dinner? Not making gravy? After removing the bird, add water to the pan, scrape up the bits from the bottom, and simmer for about half an hour. Strain, cool, and skim off the congealed fat.
Those rotisserie chickens from the supermarket, so very handy for a quick supper, also have the makings of a great soup stock. Remove the skin, the bones, and the juices that have collected in the bottom of the container, and put them all into a soup pot with water to cover. Add some whole spices (bay leaves, cardamom, or your own favorite), a smashed clove of garlic, or a bouquet garni of fresh herbs (see below), and simmer for about an hour. Strain and discard all the solids, refrigerate, and skim off the congealed fat.
To flavor all these, add your own favorite spices and herbs. If you want stock that is completely clear when it is finished, rather than speckled with bits of green or brown, use one of the following techniques to contain the spices:
To release the goodness of whole spices, crush lightly with the bottom of a glass or the flat side of a knife, and then place them into one of those screw-together metal balls meant for brewing tea.
By the way, be careful with whole spices; don’t add them, intact, to soup — or any other food, for that matter — without some way to easily remove them. Some whole spices can be unpleasant to bite down on (think peppercorns), but there can be more serious problems. People can choke on whole cloves. And don’t try to break bay leaves into small, edible pieces; they will stay firm and the edges are sharp: there have actually been reports of people getting cuts in their throats and even along their digestive tracts. Always leave them whole, count how many you put in, and take care to remove them all.
Now for freezing. First of all, if your freezer space is limited, simmer all the prepared stocks until they are thick. This reduces the volume, so they take up less room in the freezer. It also provides you with a handy concentrate, ideal for those times when you want to add flavor but not a lot of extra liquid.
To store the concentrated stocks, you probably know the trick of freezing them into ice-cube trays, and then storing the frozen cubes in a ziplock freezer bag. If you have a large quantity of stock, another method is to place the cooled liquid into quart-size freezer bags and lay the bags flat in the freezer. Once frozen, the bags are easy to store upright in a freezer basket. Label the bags near the top, and you can easily flip through them, like those of us of a certain age used to do in record stores.
Finally, be sure to label the bags. You may think you can remember, or tell them apart by looks, but trust me, after a while you can’t.
In many of the recipes in this book, you will find suggestions for specific garnishes that complement the flavors of the soup itself. But in fact, a garnish or two enlivens just about every kind of soup. Use your “good cook” sense to imagine which ones would go well with which soup. Think about color as well as taste: something white or creamy with dark red soup, for instance, or a bright green garnish with a pale soup. Here are several reliably delicious garnishes:
If you are lucky enough to have a vegetable garden yourself, or smart enough to make friends with someone who does, that’s about as local and fresh as you can get!
It’s become something of a cliché in recent years: fresh and local is always better. But is it really?
Local, absolutely. Something that came from a farm seven miles from your house is bound to be fresher than something that traveled for three days in two separate refrigerated trucks halfway across the continent. Besides, those local farmers need our support. And of course, if you are lucky enough to have a vegetable garden yourself, or smart enough to make friends with someone who does, that’s best of all. That’s about as local and fresh as you can get!
What about “fresh”? That one’s a little more complicated.
Of course, no one in their right mind would deny that the summertime wealth of fresh vegetables and fruits is a huge blessing. I happen to live in an area with a rich agricultural heritage, and I consider myself extremely fortunate to have so many family farms and U-Pick fields nearby. Every year, I start counting down the days until they open.
However, it is possible to get so entangled in the “fresh” mantra that we lose perspective and common sense in favor of culinary political correctness. Is “fresh” always best? In my opinion, not necessarily.
To grow vegetables that can withstand days of travel and handling at several stages along the way, growers have created cultivars that look great but suffer in taste. A “fresh” tomato that was picked green, then treated with gas so it turns red, can taste like cardboard. On the other hand, green beans transported to a frozen-food processing plant within hours of being picked are in fact fresher and more nutritious than their “fresh” counterparts that were trucked from someplace like California and then stored in the supermarket chain’s distribution center for who knows how long before you bought them. Fresh pumpkins are great for jack-o’-lanterns, but something of a pain to cook and not appreciably better tasting than canned pumpkin.
So don’t automatically reject frozen or canned vegetables. Unless you have your own garden or a nearby farmers’ market, frozen or canned veggies may be your best bet for quality and nutritional value, especially in the off-season. And they’re super-convenient to have on hand. Many of the recipes in this book call for canned tomatoes, for instance, and frankly I can’t imagine my pantry without them. On the other hand, I’ve never seen frozen or canned eggplant; frozen bell peppers are very disappointing; and there’s no way to preserve fresh cucumbers except as pickles, which is not always what you want in your soup. It’s all a question of how to get the very best of what you need when you need it. And it’s also a question of common sense.
With all that said, there is still nothing like a vine-ripened tomato that really was allowed to stay on the plant until dead ripe. You’ll be hard pressed to find them anywhere except your own garden or your local farmers’ market, but once you taste one, you’ll never be satisfied with supermarket tomatoes again. An old country song claims that homegrown tomatoes are one of only two things in the world that money can’t buy (the other being true love).
The other local treasure is fresh corn. And I mean fresh. The sugars in corn start to turn to starch within hours of picking, so if you don’t have a big vegetable garden, try to find a farm stand or U-Pick place near home and go on the same day you’re having your party. By the way, I have no real scientific evidence, but I’m quite certain that fresh corn you freeze yourself maintains its “country” taste much more than commercial frozen corn. So when you go to the farm stand, buy lots, and freeze half.
The fresh/canned debate doesn’t apply to beans as widely as some other vegetables, but it does have its own decision seesaw: should you use dried beans or the canned versions?
Here are the pros and cons.
For convenience, canned wins hands down. And since the fundamental idea of a soup pantry is to enable you to whip up a nutritious soup on short notice, you probably want some of your favorite types on hand.
On the other hand, canned beans often are high in sodium, and the liquid in the can might ruin the look and taste of your wonderful homemade stock. To deal with both these drawbacks, rinse the beans thoroughly before adding them to your soup.
Working with dried beans is the opposite of convenient, but very satisfying in other ways. You save money and feel virtuous, while completely avoiding the sodium problem. Plus, many natural food stores and food co-ops carry unusual varieties (cranberry, Anasazi, adzuki, yellow eyes, and other heirlooms, for instance) that you won’t find in any can.
There are two common ways to prepare dried beans for cooking, both of which require some preplanning. Easiest is to cover your beans in about three times volume of cold water, and soak for 6 to 8 hours, even overnight. If you forgot to do that, the second method is something of a shortcut: bring the beans and water to a hard boil, remove from heat, cover, and let stand for 2 hours.
In both cases, drain off the soaking water, transfer the beans to a pot, add fresh water to cover by an inch or two, and cook, unsalted, until almost tender, so they finish cooking with the rest of the soup.
One-third cup of dried beans produces 1 cup cooked beans.