Becoming A Soup Goddess
Soups have always been mysterious to me. I have spent the past year being a soup goddess in training.
A few things gave me this idea.
I wanted to be good at hosting. Caterers usually have a soup that is easy to make for a large number of people reliably, and that is cheap to make
I wanted to make meals that would last the week.
I wanted to feed somebody who was quite picky but liked most soups.
It was mysterious and I wanted to have a better relationship to fire.
I plan to test myself. I will make a recipe book and see if I can actually make the most popular and common soups.
I think I am ready to try to make some of my favorite Vietnamese soups, and other asian soups that can be hard to get except in a large city, and even then you are limited to what is on the menu and the spice portions.
I accidentally replicated the old sweet and sour chicken soup from P.F. Changs a few months ago.
I want to log what I have learned so far, before making soups becomes too obvious and not mysterious at all.
I think that what was mysterious was “where the flavors come from.” Because everything is souping together, and there are herbs, and the broth, you can’t “see” all the ingredients. Imagine a blended sauce, like a tikka masala. You can’t see what is in it at all. It is orange goop, and so intuition about “how it becomes that” is limited before making it.
Soups, like fish, are not actually alike! Fish, like crabs, are mostly not much related to each other! Many things evolve to be fish, just as many things evolve to be crabs. They have similar features, but most crabs are not related to most other crabs, and most fish are not related to other fish. In a similar way, a soup is something more watery than a stew, but many soups can be less related to each other, than they are related to other things. For example, wonton soup is closer to…wontons out side of the broth, than to other types of soup.
The special ingredients matter! A dash of sherry, a dash of vermouth, bay leaves, or a bunch of fresh dill, or a bunch of fresh lemon, or fish juice, makes a really big difference to the flavor. And then each type of soup has different special ingredients.
It is not necessarily obvious which kind of cooking does what. For example, browning the onions as part of a mirepoix is different from throwing an onion in for a very quick chicken soup or stock.
There are ~*~*~*~mysteries~*~*~*~ around what stock is and making your own stock. I like making my own stock and putting it in my soups because it is more fatty and the collagen in the stock thickens the soup.
You can perfect recipes, but you can also get away with not perfecting recipes. If you don’t have your own stock, but have sherry, or don’t have a certain herb, but the sausage you’re putting in has herbs and spices in it, then this will impact your soup.
The cooking of individual components matters. For example, if there are meatballs in the soup, the souping process will not magically assemble and season individual meatballs. There will be a recipe and process for the meatballs that will be going into the soup. If you are making a mushroom soup, you cook the mushrooms first, and then you soupify it.
That being said, some of the magic does happen during the souping stage. For example, when you are making gumbo, it is not very intuitive what makes the gumbo gumbo-into-itself to truly become a gumbo, or when that happens. The ingredients seem pretty eclectic — chicken, sausage, and shrimp? And yet the gumboing happens when you soup them together.
Which stage is “most important” for any specific soup, or which ingredient, or which cooking method, and which elements you can skip for which soups in order to make the soup faster, depends in part on the soup and depends in part on your personal taste.
That “ahhhh” feeling varies between people! The magic of a soup in creating that “ahhhh” feeling is indeed achievable, but can be person-specific and mood-specific.