The Clear Soup Method

There are many kinds of soups. Creamy, tomatoey, clear, cold, sweet, and many others. We're going to focus on the basic clear soup (as in we're not going to add cream to it, we're not going to start with tomato juice as the base or any other additional method). Simply put, the clear soup method is aromatics with flavorful liquid and filler chunks.


Hardware:

• Wide and deep pot, or a pan and a soup pot (usually soup pots are not too wide). We need the width for sauteeing

Ingredients:

• Aromatics. Onions, garlic, carrots, leeks, etc
• Spices and herbs.
• Flavorful liquid. Don't choose a strongly flavored liquid, stick with mild ones such as vegetable broth, chicken broth, flavored water (bring water to a boil, add herbs and spices and other flavors like vinegars or fruit juice like lemon juice).
• Chunks. Noodle, rice, vegetable, meat, mushrooms, potatoes. Except for the starches, it's ok to use left overs or precooked chunks. For the starches, if they're left overs or precooked, add it to the serving bowls just prior to serving and make sure the soup being ladled over is very hot
• Brighteners. To brighten the flavors, freshen it up a bit. Acids work best like lemon juice, vinegars, fresh tomatoes, etc

Procedures:

• Sautee aromatics
• Add spices and herbs until fragrant
• Add flavorful liquid
• Add chunks
• Add brighteners (fresh tomatoes, diced tomatoes, lemon juice, vinegars) either to the pot or to the individual bowls

Notes:

Almost every soup is started like this. A creamy soup will have milk and cream as part of the flavorful liquid. Tomato based soups will have a lot of tomatoes and tomato juice as part of the liquid and chunks.