A Beginner's Guide to Making a Good Soup

Beat the nip in the air with a piping hot bowl of soup! Sounds like an excellent idea especially on a day of downpour, doesn't it? But, do not resort to a packet of readymade soup powder loaded with sodium, preservatives, colours and other undesirable ingredients to satisfy this yearning for a good soup. Instead go ahead and make a fresh soup that is packed with the wholesome goodness of fresh, nutritious ingredients from scratch.  This is not at all a daunting task and one can easily put together a soup with simple ingredients commonly found in the Indian kitchen.

To make a delicious soup, one must understand the various components that together make for a great soup. While the base, which is usually a stock, is the most commonly identified constituent of a soup, other parts of the soup include - foundation, body & garnish.  

• The foundation is the main flavouring agent of the soup and includes fats, spices, herbs, vegetables, lentils or meats.
• The body of the soup is generally a thickener that transforms a soup from being a watery dish to one with a smooth consistency. Some soups have ingredients that act as inherent thickeners while others may additionally require flour, eggs (whites or yolks) or sauces to thicken the soup.
• The garnish can be anything that one adds as a finishing touch to the soup like a tadka or bread croutons or drizzle of cream/butter/olive oil or even a sprinkling of spice powders.

With this straightforward information at hand one can create a variety of soups at home. Here are a few basic types of soup one can make:

• Clear Soups

Popular as shorba in the Indian cuisine, these are simple concoctions of vegetables or lentils or even meats simmered in a generous amount of stock flavoured with whole or ground spices till they are cooked. The presence of a thickening agent is absent in their recipe thereby making these soups clear and thin. Common examples include tamatar ka shorba, moong dal ka shorba and gosht ka shorba. All one needs is to decide on the hero ingredient of the soup, stir fry it in minimal oil/ghee with spices to leech the flavours from all ingredients. Then, add stock and allow all ingredients to cook completely.  If one does not have stock, add water along with vegetable/meat stock cubes for maximum flavour.

• Puree Soup

In these types of soups the ingredients along with stock are pureed. A puree of select ingredients can be made at the start of cooking procedure or all ingredients can be combined and pureed as last step of soup preparation. However the most commonly adopted approach is the latter. This task of sautéing followed by pureeing can now be achieved with a single appliance; the Morphy Richards Sauté and Soup Maker! Simply sauté the main flavouring ingredients of the soup like mushrooms or any kind of dal or even corn kernels with onions, garlic, chillies and curry powder setting the appliance to sauté mode. Once these have tenderized, set the appliance to 'Smooth' mode to obtain a fine, even consistency puree. If one prefers vegetable or lentil chunks, then instead of running the soup maker on smooth mode, one can use 'Chunky' mode giving a good mouth feel to the soup. Additionally one can revert back to the sauté mode after pureeing to add a thickening agent if required to the soup.

• Cream Soups

In these kinds of soups, an enhanced flavour to the soup is lent by addition of fresh cream towards the end of the cooking procedure. One can prepare a clear or puree soup, then add cream and a thickening agent to it in the final stage. Cream of mushroom soup, cream of broccoli soup and cream of chicken soup are just some of the well-known cream soups.  Depending on the thickening agent and core ingredient these soups can be further be classified as chowders and bisques. Chowder is seafood or vegetable based cream soup thickened with any kind of flour or roux. Bisque is an example of cream soup made from shell fish and is thickened with rice.

With this basic understanding of soups, now there is no excuse for not making fresh soups at home.