variety of soups

Want Your Soups to Sing? Follow these 10 Steps!


Soup offers the opportunity to learn about the fundamentals of cooking, from sauteing to caramelizing to the blending of techniques, textures, and flavors, all with easy-to-follow steps.

Further, soup is flexible, meaning you can tweak it to your palate's content. Nevertheless, it's always important to begin by reading through the recipe, checking that you have all the necessary ingredients, and then gathering all the needed equipment for the task. And for even greater assurance of success, follow my top ten tips for enlightened soup-making:

1. Know Your Salt and Pepper




It will absorb some of the salt and make it more edible. Fresh peppercorns are likewise key to creating great soup. They have tremendous flavor, especially when compared to the preground stuff. You can use your own pepper grinder or look for the new peppercorn bottles in the supermarket with the grinder built in.

2. Cut the Fat in the Saute Step

Many soup recipes, including the ones I've developed here, begin by cooking and stirring aromatic vegetables--onions, garlic, peppers, ginger--in butter or oil.

These basic mixtures go by different names in different cuisines--a French mirepoix, an Italian soffritto, or a Portuguese refogado--but they all provide a foundation of flavor to the finished soup. But while more traditional recipes call for multiple tablespoons--even 1/2 cups or more--of fat, the soups in this collection rely on 1 or 2 teaspoons or tablespoons, at most.


3. Don't Go Stir Crazy

In the first phase of cooking the soup (i.e., cooking and stirring the onions, aromatics, and other vegetables), don't stir the vegetables too often; once every two minutes or so is plenty. This helps them brown, caramelizing their sugars.


4. Puree Soup in Blenders, in Small Batches

When making pureed soups, use a blender for the creamiest texture. A food processor will give a slightly grainy texture. Handheld immersion blenders are excellent when you only want to blend soups a little bit, but they are not effective for making creamy purees. Be sure to puree in small batches and crack the blender lid slightly (or remove the center cap from the lid).


5. Steer Clear of High Heat


6. Handle Dairy Additions with Care


Most soups in this collection call for the addition of any dairy products at the very end of cooking, with no more than a few minutes of gentle heating to warm completely. And if you're making a soup ahead of time, prepare it up to the point of adding the dairy, then cool and store.


7. Give Yourself Permission to Use Ready-Prepped Ingredients

Sure, fresh is best. But when you're exhausted and hungry, my position is that a homemade soup made with a few shortcuts is still so much better--both in terms of taste and good health-- than fast food. So go head and plan for those emergency moments.

Check out my list of pantry ideas, but also consider stocking up on frozen chopped onions and peppers, frozen diced potatoes (stocked with the hash browns in the supermarket freezer case), and minced jarred garlic for those times when you're too pooped to peel and chop.


8. Cut Vegetables Small for Faster Cooking

A 1/2-inch-size chop or dice needs no more than 10 minutes of simmering before it's soft, speeding soup to the table in no time.

9. Head to the Deli Counter for Cooked Meat and Poultry



