To turn any vegetable into creamy soup, follow these steps:
Step 1: Get your main ingredient ready.
The most basic soups are produced by putting your primary components fresh and boiling them in liquid. To make this sort of soup, you must prepare your primary ingredient by peeling it (if required) and cutting it into tiny pieces. Your soup will cook faster down the line if you cut it into smaller pieces.
You may wish to enhance the taste of a critical component by roasting or browning it at times. This method works particularly well with sweet, thick vegetables like sweet potatoes and squashes and brassicas like broccoli and cauliflower, which all get sweeter after browning. To roast your veggies, chop them into big pieces, drizzle them with olive oil, salt, and pepper, place them on a baking sheet coated with aluminum foil or parchment paper, and roast until soft and tinged brown on the edges.
This has two effects. Caramelization, for starters, breaks down big sugars into smaller, sweeter ones. Second, heat speeds up enzyme activities that produce simple sugars.
Step 2: Select Your Aromatic Ingredients
The soup pot's best support is onions, leeks, shallots, garlic, and other alliums. They're not there to steal the show, but your soup would be a lot less interesting without them. Almost every soup I make begins with onions or leeks cooked down in olive oil or butter with garlic or shallots (and often all four!).
Other firm vegetables, such as chopped carrots, bell peppers, celery, thinly sliced fennel, or ginger, may work well in certain scenarios, but they have a bigger influence on the dish's overall taste, so be sure you truly want them there. If you make a carrot soup with just onions, it will taste exactly like carrot soup. If you add fennel or ginger to carrot soup, it will taste like carrot-and-fennel soup or carrot-and-ginger soup.
Step 3: Make Your Aromatics Sweat or Brown
Sweating is the process of cooking chopped vegetables in fat over a long period of time. It's done over medium heat, and the idea is to remove some of the extra moisture from the vegetables while also breaking down their cellular structure to unleash their flavor. Another mechanism occurs in the case of alliums: onion scent is produced when particular precursor molecules that reside in distinct compartments inside onion cells break out and interact with one another. Sweating an onion causes the cell walls to break down, enabling this process to take place. Garlic, shallots, and leeks are all in the same boat.
Browning begins as perspiration but progresses to a greater degree of heat. Once the extra liquid from the veggies has evaporated, the vegetables may start to brown and caramelize, resulting in richer aromas, sweeter notes, and more complexity.
You may believe that more flavor is always better, so you should always brown your veggies. However, browning may frequently be overbearing, making soups excessively sweet or competing too much with the subtler tastes of your primary vegetable.
Step 4: Add Aromatics from the Second Level, such as Spices and Pastes
The following step is your secondary aromatics, an optional stage commonly skipped once your aromatics have sweated or browned. Jump forward if you enjoy really clean, pure-tasting soups. This phase will be enjoyable if you like experimenting with tastes and spices.
Ground spices (such as curry powder, ground cumin, or chili powder) and wet pastes are examples (like tomato paste, harissa, or chopped chipotle peppers in adobo sauce). Quick toasting or frying in heated oil transforms some of these components' elements into more complex, fragrant compounds, as well as extracting fat-soluble aromas so that they disseminate more evenly throughout the soup.
Because ground spices have a high surface-area-to-volume ratio and most pastes have already been cooked, the procedure only takes a few minutes—just long enough for the spices to begin to smell aromatic.
Step 5: Pour in the liquid
An excellent alternative is chicken stock, which is a simple backup. It has a moderate, neutral taste that provides meatiness and savory flavor to a meal without overpowering other ingredients. Similarly, a vegetable stock may provide complexity, but beware: unlike store-bought chicken broth, most store-bought vegetable broths are disgusting. It's better if you make your own.
If you prefer the strength of vegetable taste above balance, vegetable juice is the way to go. Carrots cooked and mashed with carrot juice have an intense carrot flavor. Nowadays, you can purchase a variety of vegetable juices at the store or make your own using a home juicer. Combining a major component with a separate vegetable juice may provide fantastic results.
Dairy, such as milk or buttermilk, is a great method to make a heartier, creamier meal, while dairy fat tends to dampen vibrant tastes. This isn't always a negative thing: in a creamy broccoli soup, for example, or tomatoes in cream of tomato soup, dairy is the ideal foil for the powerful taste of the broccoli.
If none of the other alternatives are available, water is a suitable substitute.
Don't use too much of whichever liquid you pick. Only enough to cover your ingredients by about one inch. You can always thin down a thick soup after blending it, but decreasing a puréed soup that's too thin (without risking scorching it to the bottom of the pot) is considerably more difficult.
Bring to a simmer after adding your liquid and main ingredient, and cook until the veggies are just cooked through; they should be soft enough to penetrate with a knife without resistance. You have a little more freedom with root veggies like carrots, parsnips, and other root vegetables.
It won't be the end of the world if you overcook your food. Bright green vegetables like broccoli, asparagus, peas, string beans, or leafy greens, on the other hand, should be stopped cooking before they acquire a dull green color—if you care about a vividly colored soup, that is.
Step 6: Purée and emulsify the mixture
Puréeing is the most enjoyable part. The tool you choose will determine how smooth your finished soup is.
Due to its high speed and vortex motion, a blender will provide the smoothest results. When mixing hot liquids, cover the lid with a kitchen towel, start the blender on low, and gradually increase the speed to high. Unless you like wearing hot soup on your face.
Depending on the strength of your immersion blender, you can get reasonably smooth results. It's the quickest and easiest method to cook soup, and it's a fantastic option if you don't mind a rustic, chunky texture.
You should only use a food processor as a last resort. Food processors conduct more chopping than puréeing because of their large base and low rotation rate.
Whatever technique you choose to purée, I prefer to emulsify my soup with a fat—either butter or olive oil—at this step. This gives the soup a thicker texture.
Some recipes (including many of mine) will tell you to drizzle in fat or add the butter a knob at a time while the blender is running, which is a surefire way to get your fat to emulsify properly, but here's a secret: you don't need to drizzle in the fat slowly if you don't have the world's worst blender (and someone out there does!). Even if you simply pour it all in at once, the swirling movement of a blender is strong enough to emulsify the fat.
If you want your puréed soup to be as smooth as possible, squeeze it through a chinois or an extra-fine mesh strainer with the bottom of a ladle.
Note that potatoes are an exception to the usual norms. Potatoes should never be puréed in a blender because of their high starch content unless you want a thick, gluey soup. Cooking the potatoes in liquid, then draining and pressing them through a ricer, food mill, or tamis, then whisking the pressed potato back into the soup to thicken it, is the best way to have a smooth potato soup.
Step 7: Add acid and season to taste.
In every dish, seasoning comes just before plating and serving. You may season as you go, but you won't know whether your soup is salty enough until you taste it after it's finished. Now is the perfect opportunity to do so.
Acid is also vital for bringing out the greatest taste in a dish. Because the taste of acidic substances rapidly fades when cooked, it's preferable to add fresh acid shortly before serving. Lemon or lime juice is a wonderful alternative for most vegetable-based recipes since their scent enhances vegetal tastes. A dab of cider vinegar, wine vinegar, or my personal favorite, sherry vinegar is all wonderful possibilities. The latter pairs especially well with extra-virgin olive oil-based soaps.
Step 8: Decorate and Serve
Although your soup is virtually done at this point, a little garnish never hurts. Consider it to be a necktie for your bowl.
Here are a few more possibilities:
- Oils with a strong flavor, such as walnut, pistachio, squash seed, or argan.
- Parsley, tarragon, chives, sliced scallions, chopped fresh herbs, or sensitive alliums.
- Vegetables such as mushrooms, leeks, or garlic that have been sautéed.
- Almonds, hazelnuts, and pine nuts are roasted in olive oil or butter.
- Simple gremolata-style preparations, such as parsley, lemon zest, and grated garlic blend.
- chiles, thinly sliced
- A smear of browned butter on top.
- Sour cream, crème fraîche, and heavy cream are dairy products that may be basic or seasoned with spices or pastes.
Step 9: Rinse and repeat the process
Once you've mastered these eight fundamental stages, you'll be able to make any number of creamy soups with whatever combination of ingredients you like. We can't guarantee that every vegetable and the aromatic combination will work for you, but if you use this advice as a guide, you'll be well on your way to creating the soup of your dreams. Isn't it true that we all fantasize about soup?
