please teach me how to make filling soups

wife2

Thu, Sep 04 2014, 9:16 pm

I never made soup before, aside from the occasional vegetable/chicken soup. We are not fans of soup as my dh does not like anything hot and usually wants just the main meal and does not want to get full on soup. I would like to start learning how to make soup more filling - soups with rice, barley, noodles, lentils, beans, and other similar more satisfying foods. Please do not tell me to put one of these in a pot. I do not know how to make soup. I want exact color and type of bean description or what kind of lentils, rice, noodles. How long to cook, how much water, what spices, what else to add. Please be VERY, VERY, VERY detailed instead of general as I know nothing about beans or lentils.

Thank you

Dolly Welsh

Thu, Sep 04 2014, 10:25 pm

You can burn soup. You just eat it, but you have a difficult clean up. That happens if the fire is too high.

You can make it too salty or spicy. No problem, so you dilute it. Just bring it back to a boil to sterilize the new water.

You can overcook it, but that just means everything in it is soft. That's not the end of the world. Serve crusty bread with it.

You can undercook it, but that just means the stuff in it is too hard to be comfortable to eat. So, you cook it another half hour, and you are fine.

It is better to put too much water in, rather than too little, because then you can scoop out what you like with a soup ladel, and bring up the bits with a slotted spoon, and leave the excess liquid behind. That liquid you can use another way, or just chuck.

Beans of all kinds are all good, they all need to be well rinsed in a mesh strainer. It is ok to mix them together while washing. In general they all take the same time to cook. The more food in the pot, the more time. Many people soak beans for an hour, with cold water to cover, and then discard that water and rinse, but many don't. I have but I stopped. Lentils, all colors, need to be rinsed of course, as does everything straight from nature, but not soaked.

The magic trio for soup is: celery, carrot, onion.

Just cut them up coarsely into bite size pieces, meaning half the size of your thumb.

Potatoes also adore to go into soup. Just cut up coarsely. Cooked rice will be happy in soup.

Soup is no fun without salt and pepper.

Osem powder goes nicely into soup; it is flavored salt. Garlic powder is nice too, and black pepper, though not too much, careful, is pretty much necessary. It doesn't have to be fresh ground, the box is fine.

You start soup on a high flame, bring to a boil, turn down to a strong simmer and stir maybe once. Don't leave the house while it's cooking, look at it sometimes, check for when everything in it is cooked.

A simmer is when the surface has little breaking bubbles here and there, but not all over the place.

A strong simmer is where there are a fair number of little breaking bubbles all over the surface. The bubbles should be smallish.

You can leave the pot's cover open a little, that can keep it from boiling over. In general, keep soup covered unless you are working with it; you don't want dust in it, or any food. Stuff can grow in it; it's warm, wet, and food.

Try to not add stuff to soup later, but, if you add seasoning, just heat it through, to sterilize it. You don't know what's on what you added.

Soup is a very forgiving food to cook. There is no wrong way to make soup.

The slow cooker will smile for your soup. It is made for that.

It is necessary to buy: a true soup ladle, a mesh strainer, a large, long handled slotted spoon, and two oven mits. And a large pot with a cover. The more it costs, the better it is. Stainless steel is good. Cheap pots burn more; you want a thick bottom, a heavy pot. A glass lid is nice.

When you clean the pot, soak it first with water and detergent in it. Don't gouge or scratch the bottom. Use plastic on it, not metal.

Soup freezes. Add some seasoning to defrosted soup, if it has become dull tasting.

Soup is basically water. Don't worry.

Last edited by Dolly Welsh on Fri, Sep 05 2014, 2:00 am; edited 1 time in total

wife2

Fri, Sep 05 2014, 1:21 am

zaq wrote:

I don't understand. You state very clearly that you are not fans of soup and your dh in particular doesn't like hot food and doesn't care to fill up on soup. Yet in the next breath you ask for instructions on how to make a filling soup. Explain.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I want to make the soup the main meal instead of the first course. He won't eat it if there is a main dish but will eat it if it in itself is a meal. I think that also if I learn how to cook good hearty soups then he will start to eat them. He is not into a watery broth but would appreciate a thick soup filled with grains and not just vegetables. The soup would be for the winter but I would like to get ideas now.

Dolly Welsh

Fri, Sep 05 2014, 1:38 am

Tx, Fave.

OP, rinse some barley and in it goes, into anything. A little goes a long way; it expands a lot. It is hard and takes a while to cook. It is cheap and has a nice nutty taste of its own.

Some sausage or meat bits will fill it out.

It might be an idea to have a bottle of hot sauce on the table.

A tomato product will make it minestrone. That can take some cooked pasta in it too.

Minestrone has everything but the kitchen sink in it; all pulled together by a base of a jar of Barilla sauce.

Canned beans are fine too, although dried are even cheaper. Chick peas are great too.

If you put a sliced hardboiled egg in the middle of each bowl, with a little black pepper on it for looks, that's even more nutrition.

Rutabaga

Fri, Sep 05 2014, 2:14 am

A while back I posted a bunch of recipes on a thread called "Crockpot soups." I don't know how to add a link from my phone, but it should come up easily if you do a search.

Soups are very forgiving. You can play around with a recipe until you get it just right for the tastes of your family or you can completely make up a recipe based upon what you have in your fridge and pantry.

If you are making a fleishig soup then it's good to use bones of some kind as a base to give it a deeper flavor. I like to use meat bones (neck or knee - much cheaper than flanken), but other people prefer chicken, turkey, or lamb bones.

For a heartier soup you will want to add carbs of some sort - grains, pasta, rice, potatoes, beans, lentils, etc. You can add only one type or mix and match. I like to soak beans overnight before adding them to soup.

If you like a thick soup, then cook the ingredients until they're done and puree using an immersion blender. The nice thing about pureeing a soup is that you don't have to chop the veggies as finely. Some people like thick soups but still like having pieces of veggies or sausages floating in it. You can either remove some before pureeing or add new (finely chopped) veggies after pureeing and cook again briefly until they soften.

Depending on the type of soup you are making, sometimes sauteing or roasting a couple of ingredients before putting them in the water will greatly enhance the flavor of the soup.

To make a fleishig meal out of soup, it's nice to add protein in some way. You can slice hot dogs/sausage in, or throw in mini meatballs, or add ground meat (brown it first), or cut up some stew meat (needs to cook a while), or shred some chicken, or whatever your crowd would enjoy.

Experiment with different spices. The same ingredients taste very different when you change the spicing. We especially enjoy Sephardic seasoning for a change, but there are many ethnic routes you can go. Soup is a staple in almost every country.

Soups are easy to make in bulk and freeze beautifully. When defrosting a thick soup, you may need to add a little water to the pot or it can burn.

That's all the soupy wisdom I can think of for now. As you might be able to tell, my family loves soup. DH insists on hot soup even in the heat of the summer!

tichellady

Fri, Sep 05 2014, 11:58 am

I love soup and eat it at least once a day. Almost all my soups start with a base of sauteed onions. I use a combination of Better Than Bouillon Vegetable Base and Osem Chicken Style Consomme Soup & Seasoning Mix no MSG instead of vegetable or chicken broth because it's cheaper and they take up less space than constantly buying broth. You could make your own broth, but it all depends on how invested you are in this. I use an immersion blender to make blended soups. I like blended soups that have some spinach or some beans in them that are not blended so there's some texture. There are plenty of recipes for non blended soups if you don't like that texture. Some recipes for lentil/pea soup call for blending, but you can skip that step if you like it chunkier.

Here are some of my favorite soup recipes:

http://ohsheglows.com/2012/11/.....soup/

I like Levana's soups. Here's the link to her recipe index, http://www.levanacooks.com/kos.....pes/. I usually end up adding more salt and chicken consomme to her recipes, but it depends on how salty you like your food. My favorites so far are the kabocha soup and artichoke garlic,

carrot spinach soup: about 15 servings, adapted from a susie fishbein cookbook
saute 2 medium onions in 1-2 tbolive oil, add 5 cloves fresh garlic. add 3 lbs peeled and chopped carrots, 1 cinnamon stick, 2 chopped sweet potatoes, 1 bay leaf, and water to cover. cook until vegetables are soft. puree (after removing stick and leaf) and white pepper, salt, consomme powder, dried or fresh dill. then add one half to one bag baby spinach to soup, cook for few minutes until spinach wilts.

Spinach Split Pea Soup

2 T oil
1 onion chopped
2 stalks celery chopped (you can leave this out)
6 cups chicken stock or buillion with water
3/4 cup dried split peas
1 bay leaf
4-5 cups chopped zucchini
2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp dried basil
1/4 tsp pepper
10 oz package frozen chopped spinach, thawed

heat oil in large soup pot over med-high heat. add onion and celery, saute until tender. add 4 cups stock, split peas and bay leaf. bring to a boil, reduce heat, simmer 40 min. add remaining broth, zucchini salt basil, pepper. cook 15-20 more min. take out bay leaf.
blend the soup in a blender or in an immersion blender. return soup to pot, add spinach, cook until thoroughly heated.