Soup technology. The main types of soups

2024 Author: Isabella Gilson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:14

It is almost impossible to imagine a full-fledged family dinner without soup, because it emphasizes the "home" accent of food. The variety of soups is so great that they cannot get bored, even if only one ingredient changes in the composition. With mushrooms, vegetables, cereals and flour products, with meat, fish, seafood and even milk, cold and hot, mashed, sweet - the technology for making soups is diverse, but at the same time it has common algorithms.

Classification of soups

The whole part of the first courses, called soups, can be divided into several groups that have common external characteristics and a similar cooking method. The culinary tradition includes about 150 types of soups, which in turn have more than a thousand subspecies, variations based on various components. The main types of soups are divided by type:

• The main liquid ingredient: in addition to water and broth, it can be dairy products, kvass, fruit juices, wine. Broths can be meat, fish and vegetable.
• Cooking method: pureed soups, dressing soups, clear and thickened, andalso sweet.
• Serving temperatures: hot soups (about 70 degrees when served) and cold (without cooking, 12 degrees when served). This also includes combined ones - for example, the soup was cooked, but served cold.

Refill soups

This category of first courses is considered the most numerous, as it includes many options:

• National soups: cabbage soup, solyanka (Russia), borscht (Ukraine), minestrone (homeland - Italy), bozbash, kharcho, khash (Caucasus), pho (Vietnam), etc.
• Soups with cereals: for the density of the dish, buckwheat washed in several waters, millet, bulgur, rice is added. This also includes soups with legumes: peas, beans, lentils are excellent fillers for the first course.
• Soups with flour products. Their variety is great: with noodles, dumplings, pasta, semolina and sago.
• Vegetable and mushroom soups.

Also, these categories can be divided according to the technology of making soups, which in most cases are combined due to several identification landmarks. For example, borscht is a complex vegetable soup that can also be meaty, but is considered a dressing and hot soup.

Soups with vegetables, cereals, pasta

All these first courses are united by a similar cooking technology: soup with pasta is a classic example in order to understand this algorithm. First, the broth is prepared (if the soup is meat), then it is filtered to remove smallremnants of meat and bones, boil again. Then peeled and chopped potatoes are laid, brought to half-cooked. Soup dressing is prepared in a separate bowl: as a rule, these are vegetables (onions, carrots, sometimes bell peppers, garlic, tomatoes) sautéed in oil (or animal fat) with spices. Next, dressing is laid in the soup, after boiling - vermicelli, and three minutes before the end of cooking, finely chopped or dried herbs. According to the standard technology for making hot soups, products are put into the liquid based on the time of their preparation:

• Grains 10 - 25 minutes before the end of cooking.
• Pasta 8 to 15 minutes.
• Peas and beans are laid at the very beginning, before potatoes, and it is recommended to pre-soak them for at least 6 hours to swell. Then the cooking time of the soup is halved.

Usually, all ingredients, except dressing, are dipped into the soup raw, except for pickles and sauerkraut. It is also worth emphasizing that immediately after the end of the cooking process, it is necessary to let the soup brew for at least ten minutes to enrich the taste and aroma.

Features of cooking complex soups

Combined or complex soups have several nuances that are important to know before you start the cooking process. One of the main ones: - a complex soup is always cooked on a broth (meat or fish), while sometimes some of the products during the cooking of the first course are laid after partial heat treatment. Forexample:

• Borsch (beetroot soup). The beets are cut into thin sticks or strips and added to the vegetable dressing in the process, sautéing the vegetables for at least 15 minutes with a little vinegar, sugar and spices. Vinegar is necessary so that the beets do not lose their rich color. Ready dressing is laid after the cabbage (if Ukrainian borscht) or after the potatoes are almost ready.
• Shi. Cabbage for this soup is used blanched for 3 - 5 minutes. Thus, excessive bitterness, which is often found in overripe heads of cabbage, is removed from the vegetable.
• Mushroom soup. Usually sliced mushrooms are lightly fried in a little oil before being put into the soup, sometimes with spices that emphasize the special flavor of this ingredient. A similar dressing is sent to the soup after potatoes, if cereals or vermicelli are not additionally used. Otherwise, the mushrooms are placed in the soup 15 minutes before the end of the cooking process.

Subtleties of cooking pickle

This soup uses pickled cucumbers (sometimes pickled), and vegetable dressing replaces carrots with white roots (parsley, celery, parsnips and leeks). Also, according to the technology of making pickle soup, you must first boil pearl barley (not rice!) Until half cooked. The order of putting the ingredients in the soup practically does not differ from the general algorithm for making soups with cereals:

1. Potatoes.
2. In 10 minutes - barley.
3. Vegetable dressing.
4. Pre-stewedcucumbers.

There are several types of pickle: on water, on meat broth and even with sausages as an additional fat. Many housewives replace pearl barley with rice, which significantly distorts the original taste of the dish and turns it into a banal rice soup with vegetables.

Hot puree soups

Pea or lentil, potato with cheese, mixed vegetables, broccoli - all heat-treated mashed soups have the same cooking principle:

• The main ingredient is boiled in broth or water: for example, lentils. A combination of legumes and potatoes, onions + carrots + potatoes, poultry liver + potatoes and vegetables are often used. Sometimes a vegetable dressing is used, but this is optional.
• When the soup is ready, it is rubbed through a metal sieve or simply crushed with a blender to a puree state.

Often mashed soups are seasoned with cream or sour cream, melted butter or cheese, sometimes wine or beer. This type of first course must be eaten immediately after cooking, because literally after a couple of hours it loses its palatability.

Clear soup: main differences

This type of soup differs from the others in that a strong broth (meat or fish) is usually prepared, a separate side dish, which is placed in the soup immediately upon serving or 5 minutes before the end of cooking. The most striking example is soup with meatballs, here you cantake the fish soup and consommé with scrambled eggs. The technology for preparing a clear soup is based on the preparation of a broth (usually from bones) and its subsequent clarification ("drawing" in the language of professionals). For this, lightly whipped proteins are used, sometimes meat bones or cutlet meat from beef. The sequence for making clear soup is as follows:

• Large bones, chopped into medium-sized pieces, fry a little in the oven until golden brown. This will give the broth a richer flavor.
• Pour cold water over high heat. Usually 4 liters of water are taken for 1 kg of bones. In the process of boiling, it is important to remove the resulting foam, which spoils the appearance of the broth.
• After boiling, make the fire medium or small and keep the broth for 2-4 hours (depending on the type of meat and type of bones). 30 minutes before the end of cooking, place aromatic roots, seasonings in the broth, sometimes tying them with a clean string.
• Strain the boiled broth. Next comes the extraction process: for each liter of broth, 1.5 pcs. eggs, which are slightly beaten with a whisk and poured into a stirring broth. Then it is intensively heated.

When the flake-like guy sinks to the bottom, the broth can be considered cooked: it is filtered again, poured into a serving plate and a side dish is added according to the recipe. Using the same cooking technology, fish soup can be cooked without problems, using small fish for broth, and large ones boiled in it forgarnish.

Cold soup without heat treatment

The most famous example is tarator, a cold soup based on fermented milk products. It can be kefir (curdled milk), yogurt without sugar and additives, as well as ordinary sour milk, which is diluted with too thick kefir. All the solid ingredients of the soup are crushed according to the recipe, mixed in one bowl, seasoned with spices and spices and poured with a chilled dairy product. You do not need to insist it for a long time - you can immediately serve it to the table.

Soup puree

The technology of making Gazpacho soup is very similar: its main ingredient is tomatoes, poured over with boiling water and mashed with a blender along with onions and sweet peppers.

Next, the necessary seasonings, garlic and vegetable oil are added, and in some countries crushed bread is also used. Some chefs recommend straining the soup through a sieve to achieve the perfect consistency, but this is not the case in the classic recipe. This cold soup needs to sit in the refrigerator for at least three hours for the ingredients to interact and develop flavors.

Sweet soups with milk

The technology for preparing simple soups based on fresh milk is elementary: the main side dish is pre-boiled - often it is rice or vermicelli, sometimes buckwheat or millet. Milk is boiled in a separate bowl with a small amount of sugar and flavorings (cinnamon, vanilla) and a side dish is added.

Nextthe soup is boiled for 3-5 minutes and served at the table. If very thin vermicelli (cobweb or rice) is used in milk soup, then it can be put in boiling milk without preliminary boiling, since its cooking time is no more than two minutes.

Tribute to civilization

Recently, culinary experiments have reached the point where a variety of "dry" soups began to appear, which are sold in every supermarket. Their peculiarity is that they do not need to be boiled - just pour boiling water in a large cup or bowl, mix and wait a few minutes for the dry mixture to absorb some of the liquid, turning into a fragrant likeness of food. There is no unequivocal opinion whether such food is harmful or useful, but at the same time everyone understands that it definitely will not replace rich homemade soup, the benefits of which there is no reason to doubt.