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Making Soup

For the last few years, I have been making an effort to have a soup for lunch and make a big batch over the weekend. We went through the staples we knew to make pretty quickly and then started to get bored by having just a few options to rotate through. In trying to put together a soup with whatever was in the kitchen, I realized that there are some principles that apply to making a good soup - atleast to my taste. One of the rules I decided to follow was not to introduce too many ingredients and definitely not ones that could clash at some level. So if I was making a root vegetable soup maybe stick with two of them and not extend to five. If herbs were going to be used, freshly chopped at added in the end was best. Same rules applied - maybe two herbs and where possible only one. Butter and white wine can liven the broth but not every broth is made for such treatment. 

These were my discoveries along the way of making my own recipes to suit our tastes. I spent time thinking about the soup that missed the mark - everything was in place but it was still not something I looked forward to at lunch each day. Clearly there was something foundational I was doing wrong. I started to browse through some books to see if I could learn the tenets of good soup-making. I will always find it hard to follow a recipe but I can learn techniques and rules that apply to all of them - that is like learning language and grammar. One of the books that taught me how to make fewer mistakes with my experiments was The Big Book of Soups and Stews - one of the learnings from the first fifteen minutes of reading it was the importance of temperature and how to get it right:

Simmer soups and stews over medium-low or low heat, depending on the stove. Do not boil, just keep them at a gentle ripple. Gas stoves are hotter and faster than electric ones.

I put that learning to use immediately and got much better results. The other one was about reheating:

Reheat soups or stews that have been made ahead over low heat, stirring constantly and adding more liquid if necessary. If using a microwave oven, watch carefully and do not overcook.

I don't believe I ever reheated my daily portion of soup from the weekend in the right way. It's no surprise that it got to be more and more uninspiring by the day. 

Simple and even obvious lessons in cooking but so easy to get wrong. My latest effort involved potatoes, onions, green chili, parsnip and watercress with a bit of white wine and butter. The ingredients made sense together when I thought about it. I made sure I minded the sequence of adding them and the temperature. That made a remarkable difference. 



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