What are your favorite soups? How do you make it? If I actually have the time I would love to have soup every day.
Mine (a couple of Cantonese recipes):
Pork bone soup:
Raw pork neck bones + dry scallop + a little ginger, slow boil for 4 hours, additional pork meat optional
Add carrots, black eye peas 20 minutes before eating (winter melon/ daikon optional)
Add watercress 5-10 minutes before eating
Chicken bone soup:
Soak shitake mushroom, lily bulb, dried day lily flower, fox nut for a few hours
Raw chicken bones + dry scallop, slow boil for 4 hours
Add mushroom half an hour to an hour before eating dependent on how soft they are before cooking
Add goji berry
There was a veg soup and winter soup thread. So keeping this separate from those since its summer and this can include meat.
Wow, this is the only all-purpose soup recipe thread here? Crazy!
I just made a test batch of this carrot-ginger soup to see if I liked it enough to serve at a luncheon I’m catering for Mothers’ Day. Even with the extremely basic ingredient list, it’s delicious. We tried it plain, and then with some sour cream stirred in… both are great. I was careful not to overdo the fresh ginger, and I really like how it came out.
The recipe mentions it might need thinned out after blending, and that was definitely the case for me. I just stirred in a little water. When I make it again, I will increase the broth quantity ahead of simmering by about 20%.
The full recipe only serves 3-4 people, and I would imagine a pretty modest serving at that.
We have a pot of this split pea soup waiting for supper tonight with a pan of cornbread. I can’t eat smoked meats anymore, but I don’t miss the ham with this recipe. You could make it vegetarian with water or vegetable stock, but I like the flavor the chicken broth adds. I’ve made it many times and it’s always a comfort.
Sigh… so many good soups out there. I counted, and I have about 50 different soups I like to make, most of which are amalgamations of other soup recipes, and thus I have no specific source to share. Here, however, are some of the tried and true favorites at our house (all NYT links are gift links):
I have not yet, but I use a Turkish red pepper paste (similar to tomato paste) often to thicken up or add a little depth/heat to tomato soups or my Tuscan soup.
I think roasted red peppers go really well with a touch of cream and toasted pumpkin seeds on top & maybe a drizzle of pumpkin seed oil.
My CSA pounded us with broccoli and spinach, so I made an old favorite broccoli-cheese soup from Cook’s Illustrated that uses some spinach mostly for color. (This soup has both cheddar and parm in it, but is not “cheesy.” The cheese supplies nice umami and richness, though.)
Their method involves cooking the broccoli thoroughly, to extract the flavor, but that renders the color kind of dull; the spinach corrects that.
I used to make a roasted red pepper soup for the holidays, but haven’t in a number of years. I’ll have to find that recipe, from what I remember it was simple, roasted red peps, chicken stock (not broth), s & p, something else, and a drizzle of pesto made it Christmasy. I’ll go diggin’. I roasted a sheet pan of reds the other day to put away for the winter.
I have made this yellow pepper soup (Deborah Madison) with red bell peppers and it was really good.
At times I added some roasted leeks and chile flakes and topped it with a saffron aioli…or creme fraiche. You could add roasted tomatoes or a few sun-dried tomatoes. I also like the Spicy Red Pepper soup in the original Greens cookbook that uses 1 pound of red peppers and 1 pound of tomatoes and 1-2 pureed and soaked dried ancho chiles.
Roasting the peppers is really key. Chicken stock adds a different profile from the veg stock in the recipe.
I have a lot of fresh portobellos from my CSA, but no other varieties, and crucially, no dried mushrooms. I do have leeks, many many shallots, chicken stock, unlimited fresh thyme, mild oregano and rosemary, heavy cream and whole milk.
My take would be to use the thyme, alliums, stock, and all the dairy, but save the oregano and rosemary for another day. Definitely include the @stef_bakes potatoes (or potato flour), and use the stick blender to process the whole thing after cooking a bit. Cream of mushroom soup, as it were.
