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SOUPS FOR THE SOUL: TAKE YOUR PICK
With the weather conditions fluctuating every day, it can get confusing to choose your comfort food. Chefs suggest hot and cold soups to get you through not-so-cold afternoons, as well as chilly evenings
The term ‘soup’ comes from the French word ‘soupe’, which means broth. This liquid dish goes back to about 20,000 BC, when clay pots were used to boil and cook. Primarily divided into two types — clear and thick — these soups are known as consommé and broth, respectively. Every dish undergoes change and experimentation over the years, and soups too have followed that pattern. Chefs witnessed a variation — cold soups, a classic example of that would be the chilled variety of vegetable-based soup from Spain called gazpacho.
With the weather in a whirl, here’s how soups can help you stay upbeat.
WARM AND COLD SOUPS
Through the ages, warm soups were usually cooked slowly for a long time and consisted of a combination of lentil, hard vegetable, greens, leftover bones or vegetable scraps. Opposed to that, a cold soup can mostly be described as seasonal, raw and flavoured with fresh fruit, oil or nut.
Nishant Mitra, a head chef, shares, “For warm soups we prefer ingredients that take a long time to cook, and flavour develops over every hour it simmers.”
Chef Amit Vaidya says cold soups tend to be lighter than warm soups and typically contain less fat and meat. “Some are purely vegetablebased, but many use light meat or fish stock. Whereas warm or hot soups are additionally characterised by boiling solid ingredients (meat, veget able puree) liquids in a pot until the flavours are extracted, forming a broth.”
A cold soup needs judicious seasoning and good raw materials as compared to a hot soup.
Kshitiz Shekhar, an executive chef, says, “Cold soups are incredibly easy and as they must be made in advance, they take the stress out of preparing it freshly, while the guests wait. Cold soups are a particular variation on the traditional soup, where the temperature when served is kept at or below room temperature.”
FLAVOURS AND INGREDIENTS
One can make a soup out of almost any ingredient. Shekhar advises, “If we are making butternut squash soup, it goes well with sage, which adds a robust flavour to it. Tomatoes go well with basil, soups made out of meat and meat bones go well with thyme and rosemary, and so on.”
Hot soups need a strong base flavour like that of a protein or a starch. However, balance it with delicate seasonings. So, even though the principal ingredient is dominant, it does not overpower your senses.
Chef Vineet Pathak says, “Take for example, a chicken broth in a chicken soup is a delicious flavour enhancer, but at the same time if the complementing ingredients like onion, carrot, celery or herbs are removed or the soup is too concentrated, it shall become very unappealing to the palate.”
Now, cold soups require careful selection of ingredients as it’s very subtle and refreshing. Refreshing herbs like mint, basil, lemon grass, lemon balm, etc are extensively used for cold soups. Even edible flowers like lavender, rose and hibiscus are also used to flavour cold soups. Tea leaves, too are suitable to add flavour to cold soups.
Pathak adds, “Cold soups need a milder flavour base like herbs, fruits, vegetables or lean white proteins. However, they need to be supported with sharp flavours to enhance the lack of tastebud stimulation due to their cold temperature. In this case, you can imagine how the strong flavours of basil and/or pepper and the acidic medium in a gazpacho just lift up the taste of an otherwise plain cold tomato soup.”
BESTSELLERS THIS SEASON
Healthy yet filling, warm and comfort soups that are based on wholesome ingredients like barley are the prime sellers this season. Pathak says, “The primary reason for this is the need of an energy- supplying diet for the body during winter. The growing health consciousness among people as well as the lean towards organic and sustainable food produce in the culinary world also matters.”
Krishnendu Banerjee, a sous chef, says, “If it’s hot then definitely butternut squash soup and if it is cold, then mint-infused chilled tomato and strawberry soup.”