The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (40 page)

Heat the olive oil in a 4-quart or larger saucepan. Add the onion and leeks and sauté until softened. Add the carrots, rosemary sprigs, bay leaf, stock, a couple of pinches of coarse salt, a few grinds of coarse pepper, and a pinch of cayenne if using. Bring to a boil, then cover and reduce the heat to simmer until the carrots soften, about 1 hour.

Remove from the heat. Discard the rosemary and the bay leaf. Puree until smooth. Add additional water if necessary. Return to the pot. Check the seasonings, adding salt, black pepper, and cayenne to taste. Serve warm or cooled. Garnish with a scoop of yogurt or croutons if desired.

CHAPTER 13

My mother always said that if you can boil water, you can make soup. Chef Thierry had remarked that it's a gift for leftovers. From the beginning, I planned a class on stocks and soups as the last class, knowing that we'd end with a fridge full of leftovers.

As the volunteers filed in to claim a diaper and an apron, they all fretted about the night being the last. “It's going to be so strange not to see everyone each week,” Gen said. I asked what people had been up to in their kitchens.

“You know, I've been thinking a lot about what the nutritionist said,” Dri said. “It's funny, we hear so much about how fats are bad, but then she talked about the difference between good fats and bad fats, and how olive and coconut oil are good, but, then, palm oil isn't so good. So I went through everything in my cupboards and I looked at all of the labels.” She considered the impact of feeding bad fats not only to herself but to her nieces and nephews who visit regularly. She was surprised by what she found in her wares, already edited significantly as part of her recent move. “Really, after the Alfredo versus Alfredo night, I just kind of decided to ditch most of that stuff anyway. I've just decided that I simply will not eat out of a box anymore.”

The comment spurred a lot of conversation. “I never thought I'd be like that but I'm getting there,” Jodi said. “I went to make pancakes the other day and I looked at the label. It was basically just flour, hydrogenated oil, corn syrup, and baking soda. I thought, Do I really want to feed this stuff to my son? I looked up a pancake recipe in a cookbook and thought, That's it?” She had whipped up the batter and then mashed in an overripe banana. Her face took on an obvious look of pride when she reported that her son loved them. “He was like, ‘Mommy, these are the greatest pancakes!' ”

Cheryl was baby-free again this week. Of all the classes, she confessed that this was a big one for her. When we visited her kitchen, she had made a can of soup for lunch. “I buy a ton of soup,” she admitted. The organic kinds can be expensive and often still come packed with salt. “I want to master soup so that I can cut down on how much I buy. After all these cooking classes, it feels a little lame to be opening a can.”

Few nutriments date back as far as soup, which likely debuted shortly after cavemen discovered the joys of boiling water. The word
soup
stems from the same Germanic word that led to the English word for “supper,” writes Alan Davidson in
The Penguin Guide to Food
. “From that came a noun,
suppa,
which passed into the Old French as
soupe
. This meant ‘piece of bread soaked in liquid' . . . which ultimately led to the word ‘sop.' ” So the words for
supper, soup,
and
sopping
up the soup with bread all derived from the same source.

By the late 1600s, soup was so beloved, people didn't want to leave home without it, resulting in the development of “portable soup,” which was meat stock boiled so long it reduced to a thick paste that was dried and cut into strips. The strips were then reconstituted with hot water. Davidson quotes a portable soup enthusiast from 1736 who referred to it as “veal glue.” Mind you, those were words used by someone who
liked it
. The term
restaurant
stems from the French verb for “to restore,” a reference to the shops that sold soup in the late nineteenth century. To complete the cycle in something of an ironic twist, modern restaurants make “soup du jour” from leftovers of their nonsoup menus items. I knew that Lisa had a story about the trauma of soup du jour and asked her share it.

“My very first job cooking, I spent a year making soup,” Lisa started. She reported to work on the lunch shift with a chef who had worked in the industry for nearly forty years. She was impressed by his seemingly laissez-faire attitude toward soup du jour. Broccoli looked a little shaky? He'd whip up cream of broccoli soup. Too much cabbage? He'd ask Lisa to shred it and then add some ham, white beans, and carrots. The owners fired the chef without warning a few days after she started. In her first week out of culinary school, she found herself managing a lunch shift for a sixty-four-seat restaurant all by herself.

“It felt like being thrown out of a plane with a scribbled five-point list on how to complete a parachute jump,” Lisa said. In addition to a hundred other tasks that she had to complete the morning she first worked alone, she had to come up with the soup du jour. In the walk-in, she found a Thai curry base used for a seafood dish. She thinned it with chicken stock. A revelation! Sauce is thick soup!

Although she got a handle on the rest of the job after she figured out that there would be no replacement for the axed chef, she fretted about the soup. It kept her awake at night. “The very nature of it, that it can be
anything,
just freaked me out,” she told the group. You could feel her tension in the room. Lisa studied culinary school textbooks and looked up recipes trying to combat her soup angst. “But then I would get to the kitchen and find that I didn't have all the ingredients, so I'd panic.”

Then a friend gave her
The Daily Soup Cookbook
by Leslie Kaul and Bob Spiegel. This simple book offers straightforward instructions on two hundred soup recipes organized by ingredient or theme, such as tomatoes, beans, or gumbo. She showed off her battered copy to the class.

“I would pile up my dying ingredients on a counter, and then flip through this book to find recipes that would fit. I could make something like minestrone or a tortilla lime soup, but not exactly. I would have hamburger and not sausage, or sausage but not chicken.” At first, this struck her as the culinary equivalent of forcing a square set of ingredients into a round hole. But she discovered that no matter what she changed, as long as the flavors seemed to go together, the soup always turned out anyway.

The soup du jour changed her perspective as a cook. “All those substitutions taught me that I do not have to be a slave to a recipe, or even to convention,” she said. “It also taught me something critical. You don't have to buy ingredients for soup.”

With that, we all ransacked the fridge, pulling out vegetables and the remnants of a chicken I'd roasted the day before. “Soups generally follow the same formula,” I began. “You sauté some aromatics, usually chopped garlic or leeks, and then you add in vegetables, meat, or poultry that needs some time to cook. Add in stock or water. That's a good time to add a bit of salt, some herbs and spices. Simmer for at least an hour. Give your soup some time to develop.” Foods that don't take much time to cook, such as shellfish or pasta, go in at the end. “Then taste it. Add salt or whatever it might need to pep up the flavor. That could be lemon, vinegar, maybe minced garlic or fresh herbs.” Garnishes such as croutons or grated cheese are great but unnecessary.

We started two pots, then split up the volunteers into teams and let them figure out a soup from the leftovers. One team settled on chicken noodle soup, the other on a variation of minestrone. Each built an initial layer of flavor by sautéing onions and leeks. Team Chicken added carrots, celery, fresh corn, and a fistful of fresh thyme and parsley tied together, along with the remains of the roasted chicken. Team Minestrone added zucchini, green bell pepper, cauliflower, garlic, red pepper flakes, a can of tomatoes, and the rind of some Parmigiano-Reggiano.

“You can also just start any pot of soup with half a roast chicken, whether you've bought it or you've made it, and go from there. It's an easy shortcut,” Lisa said. “If you keep your pantry stocked with some basics it's super easy to pull together a soup with minimal effort. I usually have canned tomatoes on hand, coconut milk, curry paste, rice, some type of pasta, dried beans, bacon, fresh herbs, stock, onions, carrots, celery, some dried chili pods. That's about it, that's most of my pantry. Everything else is accessories.”

Often, the difference between boring soup and fabulous soup is just time. Soup almost always has to simmer for at least an hour, usually two. It takes time to draw all the flavors out of the components. “Trying to boil it like mad for a half hour is not going to trick the laws of cooking into thinking it's simmered for two hours,” Lisa said.

We left each pot to simmer as we turned our attention to the notion of stocks.

As if on cue, Ted sauntered into the kitchen. “I heard there was some stock action going on in here,” he said. Ted is a stock aficionado; he once penned a two-thousand-word missive on the subject. “Thought I'd just drop by and have a look.”

I waved him in. “So, stock is the extra bonus from a roast chicken,” I started. “You can just simmer the bones with some vegetables. One chicken can generate a couple of quarts of stock. Considering that you pay two or three dollars for a quart of chicken stock, it's worth it not to throw them away. When it comes to the vegetables for stock, some of them can be odds and ends or trimmings you might normally throw away, like the hard heel of celery, scraps of onion, and the tough green tops of leeks. Those can all go into stock.”

“So it's basically free,” Sabra commented. “That's cool.”

The roasted chicken version is an easy shortcut, but applies the same principles of all stock. “Now we're going to start with some bones.”

Over the weekend, I had rounded up plastic bags marked “For chicken stock” and “For beef stock” from my freezer. I never let a bone go, whether it comes from a chicken I've broken down, hot wings that I made at home, or even leftovers from restaurants.

Not long before the class, we ate at the Space Needle Restaurant with friends from out of town. Mike and his friend Bill ordered the day's special, a twenty-five-ounce steak that had a
Flintstone
s-style bone jutting from the meat. The server looked at me like I was a crazy woman when I told him I wanted to take home the bones, but he good-naturedly wrapped them up in a takeout bag. As we waited for the elevator, the Italian maître d' asked what was in the bag. His face lit up. “Ah, now, that's a smart cook! I never understand why people leave without them! My nana would kill for bones like that.”