SERVE UP scrumptious SOUPS
Soothing, healing, scrumptious soups. We need them this winter like mac needs cheese. But not every home cook is up for making stock. Despite your longing for a warm bowl of soup, the thought of hovering over a huge pot with a chicken carcass might send you straight to Campbell’s. There is another way. Many, in fact. Cooking soup is deceptively simple, and a slew of chefs and cookbook authors, from Amanda Frederickson of “Simple Beautiful Food” to Meera Sodha of the enticing, veggie-centric “East,” are offering hacks and recipes to make soup a weeknight reality. Even Pacific Catch, the Bay Area chain of sustainable seafood restaurants, is sharing its recipe for silky salmon chowder, which is ready in about 30 minutes.
Here’s the first big reveal. Frederickson, the professional cook and recipe developer behind the #Fridgeforaging series, doesn’t make scratch broth. “I would love to tell you that I make my own chicken stock, but I don’t,” she says. “I use an organic vegetable broth from Whole Foods.”
Frederickson works that into a deliciously nourishing turmeric stew with spinach and chickpeas, which starts with thinly sliced, sauteed onions. Next, cumin and turmeric to build flavor while toasting the spices, which releases aromatics. Finally, stir in a cup of lentils, making sure they get coated with the onion-licked spices before dumping in the broth and simmering with chickpeas from a can.
Frederickson elevates her finished bowl with fresh dill and a dollop of sour cream.
“I’m really into toppings on soup,” she says. “Crunchy breadcrumbs, roasted nuts, fresh herbs, caramelized onions. They make such a difference.”
Her favorite soup hack is using a blender to make creamy vegetable soups that contain no cream. The base recipe can be used with any vegetable, from carrots and parsnips to cauliflower or broccoli. Frozen vegetables work, too. Just use what you have, Frederickson says.
Then, in a Dutch oven, saute veggies with chopped onions, salt, pepper and a little garlic, if you like, until soft. Use an immersion blender or puree in batches using a regular blender.
“Just remember the key to creaminess is to cook the vegetables until they’re super soft,” she says.
In her award-winning cookbook, “East: 120 Vegan and Vegetarian Recipes from Bangalore to Beijing” (Flatiron Books, $35), Meera Sodha writes about caramelizing onions until they break down into a “soft, sweet paste.” Those onions are the base for her caramelized onion and chile ramen, a soupy noodle recipe inspired by a French onion soup Sodha ate in a Paris cafe.
In her version, those slippery, sticky onions are combined with miso, vegetable stock, bird’s eye chile and cooking sake to make what Sodha calls “a very specialtasting soup.”
Soft-boiled eggs add a dash more protein. To veganize the dish, leave it out. (If you can’t find the choy sum the recipe calls for, we think bok choy would work just fine.)
Heavy cream — and lots of it — is a must for the classic seafood chowders of the season, including Pacific Catch’s salmon chowder. The base of the soup, part of the special winter menu at all 10 Bay Area locations, includes diced celery, onions, garlic and ground applewoodsmoked bacon, plus water, heavy cream and store-bought clam base. Mix in your roux, keep stirring and simmer.
“The bacon and clam base highly contribute to its savory flavor,” says Pacific Catch’s regional chef Rowena Rillo. The salmon comes at the end.
“We use a good quality sustainable Norwegian Kvarøy salmon and grill it to order, along with the bread and other toppings,” she says.
If you’re feeling adventurous, you could make a fish fumet with the heads and bones of salmon from your favorite fishmonger and use that as the base for your salmon chowder or a salmon stew with fennel, leek and Hungarian paprika.
While there’s no homemade stock in the Pacific Catch chowder, Rillo says it is the single most important ingredient in any soup, even those made at home.
Frederickson has a hack for that, too. She doesn’t like store-bought chicken stock.
“I use the bones from a rotisserie chicken and throw them in the Instant Pot for an hour,” she says. “Just fill it with water, add a bay leaf and some black peppercorns. It makes a great broth.”
“All soup is soul food.”
— Bee Wilson, author of “First Bite: How We Learn to Eat”
INGREDIENTS
For each bowl:
2 ounces salmon
2 slices ciabatta or sourdough
2 cups clam chowder base (see recipe below) Drizzle of lemon olive oil, garnish
Sliced green onions, garnish
Crispy shallots, garnish
Lemon wedge, garnish
DIRECTIONS
Grill the salmon and sliced bread. Ladle 2 cups of hot clam chowder base into a bowl, place the pieces of grilled salmon atop and garnish the bowl with a drizzle of lemon olive oil, green onions and crispy shallots. Serve immediately with grilled bread and a lemon wedge.