Soup Making Tips

Soups are considered to be the important part of a meal, certainly ought not to be flavoured like sauces, which are only designed to give a relish to some particular dish.

Soup is a liquid food made by boiling or simmering meat, fish, or vegetables with various added ingredients. Since the main ingredients are meat, fish and vegetables, we should make sure that all the things used are very fresh. Stale ingredients used will give bad taste to the soup. In case of making soup using any type of meat, we should take care of using lean meat only.

To make a tasty sumptuous soup the ingredients used in it should be in correct proportion to bring out the flavour of every individual ingredient and as a whole making it very tasty. It is understood that the vegetables used must be very clean. The quantity of water used should be perfect, if the soup is too watery it can spoil the taste. The best cooking method for the soup is simmering, as this is the only method of cooking which brings out gradually the flavours of the ingredients.



Soups cooked in a closed container are supposed to be tastier but venting some steam is ok. The time taken to prepare soup is between three to six hours and it tastes better if it is prepare a day ahead. If the soup is cold, removing the fat becomes very easy. To remove the fine sedentary things from the soup, either pour out very slowly or use Tamis or a fine cloth.

There are two types of soups, clear soups or thick soups.
Clear Soup
This type of soups is translucent

Thick Soup
This type of soups is creamy. To make the soups thick ingredients like potato, bread, flour, rice arrowroot powder, barley or oatmeal are used.

Along with the meat, fish and vegetables, herbs are also used for preparing soups. Sage, mint, basil, cress-seed, parsley, thymes like common, orange, lemon thyme, and marjoram are used to enhance the soups flavour.

To season the soups, bay leaves, tomato, tarragon, chervil, burnet, allspice, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, clove, mace, black and white pepper, essence of anchovy, lemon-peel, and juice, and Seville orange-juice, are used. These herbs can be manipulated with the variety in get unique tasting soups.