Vegetable Soup

Okay, Year From Scratchers, we have another no-recipe dish for you, and one that's endlessly customizable. It's vegetable soup! And if you don't think you like vegetable soup, but you've only had canned versions, then you would probably very much enjoy some vegetable soup.

There were a few reasons to make soup this week. First, the weather has finally started turning cool, which is a sure sign of soup weather. Second, a friend has been complaining on Facebook about the state of canned soup, and had gotten so far that he was trying low-salt canned soup, which is a sure path to disaster. Finally, Melanie had gotten a sore throat, and soup is what you want under those circumstances.

There are three basic phases to vegetable soup. Stock, soffrito, and cooking. Stock we have covered before. Your soup will be much better with your own stock. But! If it's a choice between no soup, canned soup, and homemade soup with boxed stock, buy a couple of boxes of stock and make some soup. Go with the low-sodium stuff though, please.

Soffrito. Much as with the tomato sauce (which you will think is suspiciously similar to this soup preparation, and with good reason), you cook some diced carrots, onions, and celery over medium-low heat until the onions start looking less solid than translucent. If you are really keen on doing it properly, start cooking the carrots, and then add the celery a few minutes later, then a few minutes later add the onions. They each cook at different rates, so you get a more even soffrito if you cook them that way. More often than not, I just cook them all at once.

Coooking. When I make vegetable soup, I generally take my non-soffritoed vegetables and roast them in the oven. Whether you roast or not, you do have to decide when you're cutting them what kind of soup you are planning to make. If you want a clear broth with recognizable vegetables, then you have to cut your vegetables to the size that you will want them in the end, so probably not larger 1/2" on each side. If you do like I do and puree the soup at the end of the process, then just roughly chop your vegetables.

If you're roasting, set your oven to 375°F. Lay out your vegetables on a jelly-roll pan, lightly coat with olive oil and salt, and roast for 10 minutes or until they start to brown. If you're trying for a soup competition, stir your vegetables half-way through to ensure even browning. If you're in a hurry, just let them get a touch of brown on them and move on. If you are really in a hurry, skip the browning altogether. You will have to let your soup cook for longer if the vegetables aren't roasted ahead of time, but it's time that you don't have to spend cooking.

You are going to have potentially two kinds of vegetables that you are cooking: vegetables that can stand up to long cooking, and vegetables that will disintegrate if you cook them too long. The tougher vegetables, such as broccoli, cauliflower, and the like, can go into the pot early, roasted or no. The more delicate vegetables, such as a squash or peas, you'll want to wait until the soup is nearly done before you add them. I do recommend some tomatoes in your soup as well. A can of good tomatoes are my usual preference, especially considering the seasons in which I normally cook. This time, I had a bunch of fresh tomatoes from the farmer's market, so I added those. Tomatoes should go in the pot early on, incidentally.

Now, let's discuss proportions. Think about how you want your soup to be. The proportion of stock to vegetables in the bowl should be what you put in your pot. A good rule of thumb is to fill up the pot half-way with vegetables, then fill the pot with stock (leaving room for the more delicate vegetables, of course). If you want a hearty soup, and you're going to be pureeing it anyways, you can do what I sometimes do, which is to fill the pot with vegetables and them squeeze in the stock around it. This is not, technically, soup. If you were in a Top Chef challenge, and you served this and called it soup, Gail would look at you askance and suggest that this doesn't have the proper balance of liquid to be a soup, and perhaps it's not pretty enough to be served anyways. However, I was not making competition soup, I was making something packed with flavor and nutrition to make me feel warm and happy on a cold day. And so I did something like this:

That pot was filled to that point with vegetables, and then you can see some stock peaking through in the back. This I simmered for an hour, covered. Test the texture of the vegetables to see if it's done before removing it from the heat. When it is, add your delicate vegetables.

Next, if you are planning to do so, you can blend your soup. I use a stick blender, which is especially handy for soups. Put the blender all the way down to the bottom and start it up. Don't leave it near the top, or there will be boiling-hot soup thrown randomly around the kitchen, much of it landing on your face and arms. If you have some particularly expensive clothing on, it will toss whole tomatoes onto that garment whether you had added tomatoes to the soup or not. The stick blender loves to mess with people if they don't blend from the bottom of the pot.

After this, you need to season the soup with salt, and you'll probably add some pepper as well. Seasoning goes something like this: taste the soup. If it's not filled with flavor, grab a heavy pinch of salt, throw it in, and stir. Repeat until the soup is magnificent. Do not just throw in a huge amount of salt to try to get you close to where you need to be. It is very easy to over-season if you do that. This is probably the most important part of the process, and the one which will determine if your soup if perfect, bland, or salty. Everything else you can more or less do with your eyes closed (metaphorically speaking. Don't cut vegetables with your eyes closed). This part should be done with extra care and love, and will reward you with better soup than anyone else can make.

Comments

[Jess]

Since it's fall, can I request something pumpkin-y? I bake a lot using canned pumpkin but I'd like to tackle a whole pumpkin sometime and would love some info.

[Brian]

You could peel and roast the pumpkin as your vegetable, toast the seeds, cook the pumpkin in your soup as above for the full time, add in some cream at the end, and puree until smooth. Sprinkle the seeds on top for some crunchy.

Also, I believe Fine Cooking is doing a "use the whole pumpkin" thing this issue, so that's probably worth checking out.

But I will see if I can't do something special, especially if I get a pie pumpkin in my CSA.

[Share]

Autumn cheesecakes... if you haven't tackled cheesecakes yet.
As far as pied... We tried the fresh pumpkin when i received one from our organic coop last yr. However it was the 'wrong' type of pumpkin and came out tasting more like butternut soup than a pie...
So how do i know which squash is the right one to squish?!