Ruhlman's Twenty (34 page)

NOT LONG AGO, I WAS ON A PANEL WITH
erstwhile
Gourmet
editor and author Ruth Reichl when chicken stock came up. “You know what they say,” she said. “If you’ve got chicken stock, you’ve got a meal.”

And it’s
true.
Soup nights are the easiest meal night. In the winter, a day or two after a roast chicken dinner, having kept a pot of
Easy Chicken Stock
on the stove top, I strain the stock over some sautéed chopped onion; add leftover vegetables and chicken, and sometimes dried pasta or potatoes; and season with salt and a squeeze of lemon or some drops of vinegar. In short order, the soup is ready to go. Soup like this is infinitely variable. Want some delicate Asian flavors? Sauté garlic, scallions, and a chunk of ginger, strain in the stock, season with salt or soy sauce, fish sauce or miso, rice vinegar, and a drop of sesame oil, add chicken or tofu or wontons, and you have a great meal. Want a spicy soup? Add red pepper flakes to sautéing onion, then your stock, and finish with chopped escarole/Batavian endive and sausage.

These are reason enough to have chicken stock on hand. But soups are a breeze, a deeply satisfying breeze, even without stock. Milk can make a great soup base, and vegetables can be puréed and thinned for soups.

Soups warm us when it’s cold and cool us when it’s hot. They nourish us by capturing all the nutrients in the ingredients and transferring them to us spoonful by spoonful down to the last swipe of a crust of bread.

What makes this happen is the magic of water, its ability to extract flavor and nourishment and disperse them throughout the soup, to carry any garnish, and to receive any seasoning. Soups are often so basic that seasoning is the key factor in how good they turn out to be.

The most important skill in making delicious soups of any kind is learning how to evaluate a soup.
Think
about it. Taste it, and think some more. As always, ask yourself if you’ve got the right amount of salt. The soup should taste seasoned rather than flat or dilute, but you should not taste salt. Flatness can also be fixed with fish sauce, which makes the flavor seem to fill the mouth more. You do not want to use so much that you taste fish sauce.

Ask yourself if the soup would benefit from a little acidity. Not sure? Take a spoonful and put a drop of vinegar or lemon juice in it and taste. Does the soup taste a little brighter, a little more interesting? Then add a little vinegar or lemon juice to the pot.

If you are making a clear soup with garnish, like chicken noodle, ask yourself if you have the right proportion of liquid to solids and adjust it as necessary.

For a creamy or thick soup, ask yourself if the texture is right. You are evaluating the soup as you would any other dish or preparation. Does it have a balance of textures? Soups are soft, but we love crunchy (that’s why we have soup crackers). Perhaps your soup would be delicious garnished with some croutons or fried tortilla.

Some soups are meant to be lean and are a pleasure in their leanness. But even lean soups are enhanced with a little fat—perhaps finish the soup with a few drops of extra-virgin olive oil, sesame oil, or truffle oil, or with some crème fraîche or mascarpone cheese. This would be considered a finishing garnish.

Think about what other garnishes would be appealing. If you make a puréed vegetable soup such as asparagus, a final garnish of cooked asparagus tips would be good. Does the soup need a little color? How about some lemon zest?

Finally, think what you’re serving with the soup. You want an appropriate food to serve beside it—garlic toast with white bean soup, for instance, or pappadams with curried soup.

In culinary school, soups are among the first techniques taught because they put so many basic cooking skills to good use. In this context, soups are broken down into categories, and although they can vary and overlap,
thinking
about the categories gives you flexibility and agility. Don’t think of a classic chicken noodle soup as being different from a Mexican corntortilla soup, or an Asian wonton soup, or a Thai
pho.
They’re all the same, broth with different garnishes and seasonings—or, in chef speak,
flavor profiles,
a term that is useful but has yet to find its way into the home kitchen. I like the term because it acknowledges that cooking does not depend on knowing thousands of recipes but in understanding a set of manageable categories within which there are thousands of variations.

In the most basic terms, there are two types of soup, the clear soup and the puréed soup. The puréed soup is often broken down into the cream soup (cream of broccoli was the example we learned in culinary school) and the vegetable purée (black bean soup, for instance, or split pea). The puréed soups overlap in many ways— most cream soups are puréed in some way, and many vegetable purées are finished with cream.

CLEAR SOUP:
The clear soup, the most basic kind of soup, involves little more than sautéing some onion (and other aromatic vegetables depending on the soup), then adding stock and any other ingredients, such as meat, vegetables, starches, or dairy. The clear soup is simple and boundless. Clear soups are all about featuring the garnishes, using the stock as a platform.

PURÉED SOUP:
The puréed soup is simply food you’d normally eat solid transformed into a liquid. Why would we do this? Because the food is often better this way. A black bean soup, to my palate, is better than a scoop of black beans. Diced cooked celery root, or mashed celery root, is a nice accompaniment to braised beef, but if you want to feature celery root, you do so in a soup by cooking the celery root in an appropriate liquid, puréeing it, and seasoning it.

Sweet soups, fruit soups, are another form of puréed soup. When you have good fruit, you can simply purée and strain it. If you like cooked fruit, such as poached peaches, pears, or apples, the fruit can be puréed with some of the poaching liquid (simple syrup, white wine, and a vanilla bean/pod, for instance) for a terrific fruit soup, appropriate for dessert or, when made less sweet, a starting course.

With a puréed soup, the garnishes are secondary.

The garnish, the nonsoup ingredient, is what makes a soup fun, distinguished, and memorable. I’m tempted to compare garnish in a soup to sartorial accessories: a plain dress, or slacks and shirt, can stand out with the right necklace, jewelry, earrings, belt, hat, scarf, or brooch. But garnish is more essential, more like shoes and a jacket. It is a fundamental and integral part of the soup. That I probably have more to say about garnish in soup than I do about soup itself attests to the critical nature of the garnish. As for soups, it is useful to break garnishes into categories.

VEGETABLE GARNISH:
Vegetables are a primary garnish, contributing flavor, color, and body. Any vegetable can be added to a soup. The only consideration is whether you want to precook the vegetable. Most vegetables are best cooked in the soup; this makes flavor and nutrition sense. If you are entertaining or want the garnish to stand out—diced carrots in a fresh pea soup, for instance—you can blanch and shock the garnish vegetable first. In the
Cream of Celery Root Soup
, the diced celery root garnish is cooked until tender and the soup is added to it, so that the garnish stands out.

Leafy vegetables—spinach, escarole, sorrel—make a great garnish, adding flavor, nourishment, and color. Onion is considered an aromatic rather than a garnish, unless it’s featured in some version of onion soup.

MEAT GARNISH:
Meat, in all its forms, makes a powerful and substantial garnish. If soup were a chess board and garnishes the pieces, meat would be a rook. Chicken in a chicken soup, shredded beef in a beef soup, and sausage in just about any kind of soup can’t be beat. Don’t limit yourself to the standard use of leftovers (though that’s a fabulous way to make use of food). Meat attached to bone is a fine addition—not only are spareribs in a soup great to eat, but they add flavor and body. Skinless chicken wings, sautéed with the onions, would make a flavor-enhancing garnish. Finer cuts work well—if you cut your own beef tenderloin, you’re left with a lot of trim, which can be diced and added raw to a hot beef soup. Pot-au-feu is a soup-as-meal with meat at its center.

STARCH GARNISH:
Noodles and rice are the most common starch garnishes. Potatoes and other starchy vegetables are an excellent garnish. Corn is a kind of starch-vegetable garnish that makes for superlative and hearty soups. Bread—soft for body and substance, or hard (whether three-day-old or baked into croutons) for substance and texture—is one of the best things to add to soup. Bread is also easy and economical.

EGG GARNISH:
Almost every soup is improved by the addition of an egg. No garnish is at once so easy and so impressive. To use a raw egg, make sure your soup bowls are hot and your soup is boiling hot. Crack an egg into each bowl and add the soup. You can also poach the eggs ahead of time to add as a garnish. Or cover whole eggs with cold water, heat the water, and remove the eggs as soon as the water comes to a boil; they’re ready to be cracked into bowls of hot soup.

CRISP GARNISH:
I almost never serve a soup without putting something crunchy in it, on it, or with it. If you’re serving a very refined consommé and want to focus on the clarity and flavor of the broth, you might forgo the crunch. But most soups benefit from something crunchy. This can be as simple as serving a toasted baguette or crackers alongside the soup, or more elaborate, such as a fried celery root chip along with a celery root soup. Or the added texture can be something that’s naturally crunchy, such as a raw vegetable.

ENRICHING GARNISH:
One of the pleasures of soups is that they are both lean and satisfying. But on occasion a soup might need an additional something, a soupçon of richness to balance the lean and clean. A common garnish is a tart dairy product such as sour cream or crème fraîche. These add acidity and richness along with some visual contrast. Flavorful oils make visually enticing garnishes—olive is the most common, but a range of delicious nut oils is now available to cooks. A less common enricher for soups, and one that has a powerful impact on flavor, is grated Parmigiano-Reggiano—it adds richness and a serious flavor kick.

Seasoning a soup is mostly about training yourself—tasting and thinking and remembering what you experience.

One of the best ways to teach yourself about how to season is to taste the soup and then taste a spoonful with a little of the seasoning you’re considering. If the seasoning is salt, take a spoonful of soup, add a few grains, and taste and compare. Follow the same method to understand the impact of a drop of vinegar, especially in cream soups. Add a drop of vinegar or lemon juice and compare. Now you can sense the impact of acidity.

Seasoning a spoonful of soup also helps you know whether you’ve chosen the right
seasoning. Maybe the soup doesn’t need salt or acid. Taste it in a spoon before you change the flavor of the whole pot.

Another powerful seasoning device is
fish sauce
. It’s salty, but gives soups depth. Again, use the spoonful method to sense it for yourself.

You might consider adding a little heat, such as cayenne pepper or Espelette powder.

Because soup is so easy to make, it’s a practical choice for weeknight dinners. Soups come together in a snap, are delicious and nutritious, and put leftovers to good use.

Because soups hold so well, they can be made a day ahead. They also make a great first course for entertaining. They can be simple creamy soups, cold or heated at the last minute and served. For something fancier, you can set out bowls containing a cooked garnish and pour the soup at the table.

Soups make a terrific canapé. Thomas Keller at The French Laundry was among the first chefs to serve soups in demitasse cups. This is easy to do at home, as a canape. The soup should be rich and satisfying, focusing on the main ingredient, or should be lean with a compelling featured garnish.

Soup is food manipulation at its best and most powerful.