Cream of Broccoli Soup
Who doesn’t love cream soups? The home-made kind, that is. (Canned cream soups are usually more filler than substance.) Here’s a way to make cream soups that are velvety and rich without the actual cream. The trick is purposely mis-using a starch to thicken the soup. (Go here to learn more about starches.) In this case, I used Idaho baking potatoes–the high-starch variety that breaks down when you boil it. (Hence, they’re called “baking” potatoes; they’re not meant for boiling unless you’re going to mash them.) You could also use short-grain rice to achieve the same effect.
This is a very customizable soup, so I’ll lay out the basics and let you choose what you’d like to make.
For the base flavor, begin by sauteéing aromatics in a soup pot in a tablespoon or two of olive oil. Aromatics can be any combination of garlic, onions, shallots, or leeks. I used 2 cloves of garlic and a small onion for my soup.
After 2-3 minutes (the onions should be almost translucent), stir in your stock–chicken broth, water, a splash of dry white wine, or a combination. I used about 3 cups of chicken stock to make a batch of soup big enough for two hearty servings.
Add your potato chunks or rice and make sure there is enough liquid in the pot to cover them. Reduce heat to a simmer. At this point, you have to think a little bit about your timing. The starch will take 25 minutes to soften, so add your main vegetable(s) when enough minutes remain on the starch to cook the vegetable. Example: carrots, cauliflower and sweet potatoes take about 25 minutes to cook, so add them immediately. Broccoli, celery, corn, mushrooms and tomatoes only take about 10-15 minutes, so cook the starch for about 10 minutes before adding those vegetables. Very tender vegetables such as spinach, Swiss chard and peas only take a few minutes, so add them at the 20-minute mark and warm through. I used a full crown of broccoli for my two-person batch of soup.
You can add seasonings when you add the vegetables–a pinch of ginger for carrot soup, a sprinkling of thyme with sweet potatoes, a dash of cumin for southwestern-style corn soup. The way I figure out what spices/herbs to use is by smelling the vegetable and then whiffing the spice immediately afterwards. If the scents mingle well, then I add about 1/2 teaspoon of the spice to see how it will taste. Dip a spoon into the soup a few minutes before it’s done to get an idea of how the flavors are mixing–you may wish to add more of the same spice or perhaps try a pinch of a new one. This is also a good way to determine if you need to add salt and/or pepper to your soup. (The amount of salt you add is dependent on how salty the chicken broth is to begin with.)
When the soup is cooked, you can blend it into rich creaminess with a hand blender or in a regular stand-up blender. You may want to swirl in a tablespoon or two of Greek yogurt to give your creation a hint of dairy cream. Garnish with contrasting-colored vegetables to give the soup a bit of dramatic flair.
Enjoy!
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Tags: grains, root vegetables, soups, starches
