Around the kitchen Table - How to Make Delicious Soups

Hey everyone, I'm Chef Dennis Littley and welcome to Around the Kitchen Table with my co-host Susan Sarah. How you doing, Susan?

I'm doing great, Chef. I'm doing great. I'm loving our colors, they're complementary. You have the carrots there which complement my glasses and my scarf, and of course blue is a complementary color, so you're looking awesome.

We're looking a little Denver-ish today with the blue and orange.

Oh, true. Okay, yeah, you have to remind me of that. That's okay, except it reminds me of when I went to Vegas in January to the Kitchen Show and it was the same Super Bowl weekend and I said, okay, well let me place a bet because my son-in-law is a big Broncos fan. So, you know, place the bet, $100, sure, no problem. Promptly lost it. So, you know, that's my story about blue and orange.

I'm telling you, I think that surprised a lot of people. No one works— nobody was expecting Peyton Manning to go down like that. But I wouldn't count them out this year. I think they're gonna be kicking some butt this year too. My poor Falcons, on the other hand, don't stand a chance in hell as long as Jerry Jones owns them.

Okay, yeah, now you're talking over my head, but I have to— I do have to do one more shout out, and that is blue and orange for Syracuse.

Yes, Cuse!

So go Cuse, which is my son-in-law's alma mater and obsession. And I will tell you, when he first started dating my daughter and we brought him over, and I guess for fun, you know, it was a big game, the big game, I went— we went out and we got all kinds of foods that were either blue or orange, and both blue and orange. And so we had a whole blue and orange spread. I mean, you know, there's not a whole lot of blue foods, but we found them. So that's a memory.

That's good. Well, actually, they have the Orange Men too, aren't they? The Syracuse?

Yes. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And the basketball, they were awesome last year. I think they were in the finals last year, if I'm not mistaken. So shout out to Q's fans.

There you go. Okay, let's do a few shout outs out in the audience today. And we have Carmen Mandich is in there. Hi Carmen, it's always nice to see you.

Yeah, always lovely to see Carmen.

Alright, why am I not—

are you— oh, Nazim's in the house.

Mine are not working.

Your comment tracker?

Yeah. No, it's up but it won't let me pull them up.

Oh, all right, well, you work on it and I'll go down the list. Nazim, happy to see you. He says, go Dolphins.

There you go, different blue, Nazim.

That's right, that's right. Suzanne Barracini tuned in and ready to learn. Let me tell you, I am too. And of course I pick out colors, you know, to talk about, but it's about about the food. Carmen, we have— oh, we have Candy Sakai. Okay, yep, yep.

And Candy got up special for this.

Oh yes, she did.

And we're actually going to be doing a show with Candy. Me and I are going to be— she's going to be taking us to a big department store in Tokyo next not this Saturday coming up, but the following Saturday our time. And we're going to be doing it at night so we can get the times right. And she's going to be showing us some Japanese food in one of their big department stores. You know how they have these big— they used to have them a lot in the US. They don't have them as much anymore. I want to say automats, or what did we used to call them? Yeah! Remember those? Where they had all— every food under the sun down in their basement.

Oh my gosh.

They still have them there, so she's going to take us on a tour of Tokyo. So hi, Candy. Good to see you.

Yeah, so— and Nazim asked if we're doing conch chowder. I don't think today.

We're doing something close, but it's not conch. But it could be made conch chowder. And we're not doing conch chowder mostly because I don't like conch.

Sorry. Oh, OK. I had this beautiful, beautiful snail dish, escargot, in France. Yes, and I take the shells home. So, yep, very cool, beautiful decorative piece for the kitchen. So what are we doing today, Chef?

Well, today, you know, it's almost— it's not quite fall, but for me living in the Northeast, Labor Day was always the day that signaled the end of summer because all the shoobies went home, they packed up when I was living on the shore, and They just— the city would be ours again. It would be empty, it would be ours. And that also meant the weather was starting to get cooler, the nights were getting longer, the day was getting shorter. So one thing that I always think of when fall starts to hit are soups. And, you know, they're great in the summertime, but honestly, you know, when it's too hot out, I don't think about soup too much, even cold soups. It's just not something that I really enjoy that much. So Cold soups don't make their way on my table too often, and hot soups, it's just I don't want to heat the kitchen up anymore. But now fall's coming, a lot of good vegetables are in the markets, got a lot of great winter vegetables coming up that you can make soups out of. So I just want to go over some tips, you know, and some of it is prep and how to do prep work and how to get your knife skills a little, a little better so that it doesn't take as long, and maybe some ideas on how to keep it from taking so long.

Yeah, and I have some questions for you, absolutely, about soups. And I just had one. We went out to dinner Friday or Saturday night, and I had a potato bacon gorgonzola cream soup, which was the special that evening. I mean, I could only eat— I couldn't even eat half of it, but I had to taste it. Sometimes I order things and I know I'll only be tasting it a little bit. Imagine that, potato, bacon, gorgonzola cream. Come on.

Yep. It's almost, when you think about it, it was almost a baked potato soup, a loaded baked potato soup.

Right.

Twist on it. It's thinking that way a lot of times that can give you ideas. We're going to start, and with any soup, we always start with the holy trinity of vegetables. Every soup I make, with the exception of usually cream soups unless they're chowders, Start with celery, onions, and carrots. And people always, you know, I've watched people cut vegetables and sometimes it's like a— it's not a good thing to watch them cut. So I don't know if we can see this properly or not. I'm just gonna rearrange a little bit.

I mean, yeah, it looks great from where I sit.

Okay, here we go. I wasn't sure if it was all coming in the lower third or the The film strip was blocking a little, so I wasn't sure. Alright, so carrots. Carrots are very easy, very colorful. It's a great way to get things in your soup. So one thing you want to do is peel your carrot, wash your carrot. There's certain vegetables that I will always buy organic. There's certain vegetables I don't always have to. Carrots are one of the ones I buy organic because when you think about it, it's in the ground. Things that are in the ground, you really want to be a little more careful. And if you go to places like BJ's, just started carrying an incredible line of organic vegetables, you know, compared to regular vegetables at a supermarket, probably about the same cost. So look for where you can buy them. But carrots are one of them, potatoes are the other one. You want to look for certain vegetables that you want to try and buy organic. So you peel it, you wash it, you peel it, you cut each end off. Now, if I was still in a production kitchen— or if you make your own stocks, save these pieces. Or if you roast meats, save these pieces. Get a Ziploc bag, throw them in there, throw them in the freezer. When you want to go make stock or you want to roast a piece of meat, then you can put out all your scraps, and you can put them in the bottom of the pan, or you can put them in a pot to make your vegetable stock with.

Oh my gosh, that is like— that's life-changing.

Okay, so don't throw them away. So When you're cutting, simple rules. I'm right-handed, knife's going in my right hand, so I'm going to hold with my left. Now, when I go to cut this carrot, carrots wobble. It's a fact of life. So whenever I get anything that's got a bigger end or it's going to be more hard, it's going to be more difficult to cut, I always start at the thicker end. Now, I grab either side of what I'm going to cut, and then I take my knife into the deep end so it's sitting in there like this. So then I can force it down a little bit, and then I can guide it down the rest of the carrot to split it. Now sometimes you get these humongous potatoes or squash that are hard to cut. Same philosophy: start and cut gradual, work your way down. You don't have to slice right through it or chop it.

And you know what I look forward to as we go along in, in the fall is parsnips drive me crazy. Because they're so big at one end and so tiny at the other end. So I'm sure we'll hit that later.

Same, same kind of thing, you know, if you're going to peel them, you know, first you want to cut them and get all the insides out if there's anything inside. And then just you work— always work on the big end first. You can cut them, cut them off in half too, so you have— you don't have to work with things as precariously. So here we have— first thing we do Just turn them over so they don't wobble anymore. All right, then these, these are for soup, so I'm, I'm going to make kind of a rough cut. It's not going to be a big dice, it's going to be more of a medium dice. I could do a fine dice, and if I was going to do a fine dice, I would just try and cut these a little thinner, but I'm not going to do that. So I'm just going to cut them a little bit. Now that's a little thick, I might take that down a little bit. So once you see where they are, depending on what you're making, a soup, you want bite-size, nice small bite-size pieces. This was a stew, I'd cut them a little differently on angles and make them a little chunkier because I'm going to cook it a little bit longer too and they're going to get soft.

This is so great to have the step-by-step. I never knew about really prepping carrots, you know, that way, but it makes perfect sense.

So now I have two carrots cut. What I do is then I'm going to pull them together and I'm going to hold with my left hand because I'm right-handed. I'm going to pull them in here and then I'm going to put the tip of the blade down and I'm— all I'm going to do is pick up the heel of the knife and cut. Tip is staying down. And as I cut, I'm taking this hand and I'm moving it back and pushing the carrots forward a little bit. Stop.

It always scares me to death when I see this technique that the knuckles are going to be—

this was the knife. Here's where the knife's going.

Oh, oh, oh my gosh.

Okay, so I think about myself. If I do this, I'm going to cut, but I'm curling my knuckles in. So this is a guide. Now granted, every now and then, and it's usually when someone says Yo, Chef! And I turn around, I'll cut them. Oh yeah, yeah. All right, but as long as you concentrate, this is your guide.

That's so helpful.

As they get smaller, you know, cut. Now if they're not small enough for you, pull them in, take your knife, point down, just like we would cut spices, do the same thing. And you can make them smaller. So you can cut them that way. Once they're that size, as small as you want.

Wow.

Generally, I don't do a real small dice unless I'm doing a salad like a chicken salad, a tuna salad, something that I'm going to eat or mix together with the meat. But for soups, that's a nice size cut. Okay, celery, same thing. You wash it. You take off the ends, throw them in your Ziploc bag, whatever you're making, and then pop them in the freezer. You want to cut both ends off. I already did this end. Then we're just going to go right down the rib. Now this I don't turn over. You can, but I'm just used to cutting it this way because it's almost like a little cup, so I don't worry about it as much. Then again, it doesn't have to be straight lines. We're not the CIA at the Culinary Institute. Chef's not going to come over with his tape measure and make sure all your cuts are They're not the same size, so don't worry about that. Again, pull them together, hold your finger. Now I could do maybe 2 more stalks. Start out with 2, add 3, add 4, and this is what will help you get your time down. So same thing, I'm keeping this down. Now why do we not pick it up? Because you're going to get tired. First of all, we're not chopping, and the more I lift my arm, the more tired I get. So I'm going to keep the point down. And all I'm doing then is I'm pivoting. Right, that's all I'm doing is I'm pivoting. As long as your knife is sharp, you'll cut all the way through something. When you don't have a really sharp knife, that's when you have problems, because you're not cutting all the way through.

Yes, Chef, you just went through two basic sort of movements or technique. One is how to hold your hand, you know, to guide the knife, and the other one is precisely how to hold the knife and why. And those are two things that look so simple, but the reasons behind it, you know, I never really knew, and it's really helpful.

But you gotta think, generally, if I'm in a kitchen, I'm not cutting 2 stalks or 4 stalks of celery. I'm gonna be cutting down a case of celery, or half a case of celery, or half a case, or I'm gonna peel a 50-pound bag of carrots, put them in water, and then take them out and cut them as I need them. You know, things that we would do, like if you wanna peel your carrots ahead of time, like say I'm gonna cut them tomorrow, I wanna cut some of the work out, let me peel. I'll peel them, so I put them in a Tupperware container filled with some water so they're sitting in water, and then I can take them out and cut them when I have time. Alright, that's another time saver. Do the same thing with celery, just keep them wet after you cut them. Now the other time saver is, alright, let's say you want to have some— make a little adventure out of it. It's— we have some time on Saturday, we got a good buy at the market on celery, carrots, so I'm gonna dice up a Ziploc bag full, or I'm gonna dice up— and I'm not gonna put them all in one big one because they're gonna freeze in a clump. I can break it apart. I'm going to put them in small ones. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut carrots, onions, and celery to make a soup, and then I'm going to put them in small Ziplocs and freeze them. So the next time I want to make a soup, I pull out my mirepoix from the freezer, put it in a pot, and let it start. I don't have to cut vegetables. So you cut vegetables once, maybe for the next couple weeks. Wow. Okay, so time-saving because, you know, once you get the stuff out and once you get the pattern down, and when the more you practice, the faster you're going to get. So it's going to fly by. Now, same thing with the onion. Onion, we're going to take off each end.

So which, which brings the question to me, do you ever use a food processor to chop? I mean, personally, they get too small, I think, the food processor like a Cuisinart, don't you think?

You can, they do. I would have to be doing massive amounts of them to make it worthwhile. Okay. There's a lot to be said for the therapy of holding a knife and cutting too, and you might find that mere act of doing that therapeutic, and it just, it connects you more with the food. Using— I mean, I love machinery and I will use it for for certain things. But if I'm doing small amounts, and even for me, this would be if I was doing enough to freeze for 3 or 4 batches, I would probably still cut it all by hand. But if you want to do that much and you have a good Cuisinart that has some small but not too small dices, by all means, use it. Yeah, no, if it makes your life easier and it makes you happier as a cook, do it. It's all about you. It's not about me. It's about what you like and what works for you. So, you know, that being said, go for it. Now, with onions, you see I cut each end off, and then I'm gonna just take the skin off, and if there's any black marks, you know, I might wash it off a little bit more. And again, if you can find organic onions— onions are one of the hardest things I have had to find organic.

You know, I just got some purple onions from the farmers market that were grown on the east end of Long Island just yesterday at Sunday's farmers market. I didn't know what I would use them for, but I thought I have to get them.

Anytime, you know, it doesn't matter what color they are. It's just appearance, and you can use them in soup. I tend not to use them in cream soups only because you can see them, but that doesn't mean you can't. Now again, these skins, they would go in my Ziploc with the rest of my vegetable scraps, the peels from when I peel the carrot, These, any other vegetables that I cut off, I trimmed. If you want to make a vegetable stock, you know, save yourself up a good gallon-sized bag of scraps if you have room in your freezer, and when it's time to make stock, you make stock. Now onions are a little bit different in cutting, and you will notice when I do things, I'll tend to dry the board off a little because you don't want to slip. You don't want anything slipping anymore. And if you look And see the blue cloth under my cutting board? That's to keep my cutting board from moving. You can use a wet paper towel, another Handy Wipe, anything like that, and that keeps it from sliding around because you want to be safe when you're cutting. Now with an onion, there's a couple different ways you can cut. I can show you how to make a small dice. You know, it gets a little tedious for me, so I don't do that anymore. But I just take them, and again, my fingers are my guide, and I start to slice I just don't quite slice all the way through. Now this, if I was going all the way through, for whatever reason is called an Oriental cut.

Oh my gosh, my mind is exploding, my head is exploding.

If I was gonna make French onion soup, that's the kind of cut I would make all the way through to do them. Alright, now I was taught one time that if you come in here and if you make slices do pretty much the same thing and make slices this way. That now when I cut it, it's diced.

Oh my goodness, I need to pay you for this tip.

Okay, yeah, that's all well and good. And I used to do it in my younger— wow. But I find that I like them a little smaller sometimes. So I don't do the second cut. I do slice them through though, and then I just cut them down this way. It's not quite the same kind of dice, but I can pull them in here, just cut to my heart's content.

And I mean, I have to tell you, for 40 years I have been slicing onions all the way through the first time around, the first cut, slicing them all around, and they, they, then they scatter everywhere.

So just not— wow, that's all, just not quite, just enough to make your life easier. So now I have my mirepoix: celery, carrots, onions, the Holy Trinity for any soup, or if you were going to make a sauce and we strained it out, we didn't keep it in it, but still to add the flavor to it. If it was a Cajun Holy Trinity, it would be celery, onions, and peppers. We would leave the carrots out. So that's the one difference in that. So this is what I have to start to start with. All right, now I'm going to make— it's really easy to make soups now because you can make a stock soup or you can make a cream soup. We're going to start them pretty much both the same way. Now, if this was just a straight stock soup, I would start with oil, okay? And I still can add a little oil in there, but I'm also going to add some butter in because I'm going to make a roux. Because I'm going to show you how to make cream soup too. We're just going to start very simply with half of these. Now, like I told you before, with anything extra you have, you put in a Ziploc bag, and then next time you go to make soup, you're halfway there already. I want to tell you one other tip too while this is cooking. All right, we have dinner. We all make dinners. Maybe not every night, but we make them. We try to eat our vegetables. It's one of the important things for us to do. And there's always a little bit of vegetable left over. You put it in a bowl, you wrap it up, you put it in the refrigerator hoping someone will eat it. Reality is it rarely gets eaten. It gets thrown out 3 days later and that's the end of it. All right. Let's face facts. You're not going to eat that vegetable. Get yourself another Ziploc bag. Throw all your leftover vegetables in there. Freeze them. Get enough, make vegetable soup.

Wow.

Start this out. Even if you have some little scraps of like roast beef that you know are going to dry up and get thrown out, little scraps of turkey, scraps of chicken, put them in another bag, keep them seperate, unless you want to blend the meats, that's fine too. And that can make your soup. If you have leftover rice, if you have leftover mashed potatoes, mashed potatoes are great thickeners for soups.

Wow, preach it, Chef, preach it. I feel like I'm in cooking therapy today. This is like, this is really—

well, you know, in the old days, good stuff. What were soups? Soups you made from whatever you had left over. Okay, it's just that we've made soup into an art form, so we make soup from all fresh ingredients now. It's just the way it is. But, you know, for years, and even back in the school, you know, what do I have in the walk-in? All right, I got some Spanish rice. I'm gonna make a spicy Mexican-style chicken and rice soup. You know, I have mashed potatoes. All right, I'm gonna throw some cheese in there, and I'm going to make a little bit of like a creamy potato soup. It's funny, the only one that ever knew it was one of my bosses. He says, you used mashed potatoes for this, didn't you? I said, yeah. But most of the time they can't tell.

Yeah, that's really what I wanted to know too, because you know, you can get so caught up with following a recipe word for word and line by line and, you know, go out and get those particular spices and that particular type of onion, but in the end, you know, there are substitutions that can be made.

Oh, absolutely. Now I'm putting a little salt and pepper on them. What I'm doing now is called sweating my vegetables. Sweating the vegetables is bringing some of the liquid out of them. You don't ever want to just throw these into water and boil them. For your soup base. It's all right to take all those ones that are already cooked that you're saving in the freezer, but these are raw vegetables, and boiling vegetables is not a good way to make soup. You want to sauté them in a little oil or butter first. So now, if this was going to be a broth soup, I would simply get my chicken broth, my vegetable broth, and, and I buy at the big box stores, I buy soup bases. This is a vegetable base. This is Miner's. It's one of the better ones. It's a paste. But you can also buy quart containers. They sell almost every kind of base that you could use for a soup at the grocery store. They have vegetable stocks. They have chicken stocks, beef stocks. So it makes it easy. So at this point, now that my vegetables are sweated, I would pour in the stock. Now my soup— and it's going to stop it from cooking a little bit, it's going to start to boil. Now depending upon what direction you wanted to take it in, if I'm just making chicken noodle, I may have put the chicken in here first too and then put the stock in, the chicken stock in. If I'm making rice and I'm using raw rice, I would put the rice in as it was cooking. Noodles I put in right at the very end because they they tend to get really big and funky and swell up.

So yes, that's true. But now let me ask you a question. Carrots are so dense. So, you know, does that— does it— is there— does that make a difference with the softer onions and the softer celery? You know, they're so— they're so dense.

Not really. And because they're going to cook more, the soup is not going to just be done. And I forgot my potato, so I want to do that real quick too. And I'm going to make a chowder, so I'm going to show you a potato. I'm going to cut it in half first because it wobbles and I don't want to cut my fingers. I'm going to turn it over. Now what I'm going to do here is I'm going to slice it all the way through this way, all right? So I can do it standing up or I can just change it. So now I have 3 little slices. Now I didn't peel these because they're organic. If they weren't organic, I probably would have peeled them. All right, so now that I have 3 little piles, I'm going to cut some strips. Then I'm going to turn it the other way. Now I have some nice diced potatoes. Okay, if I'm doing a stew and I want them bigger, I just don't make the cuts quite as small. Actually, the potatoes could have gone in right away.

Potatoes are tricky. They are very tricky to cook, don't you think?

They are. I like to sweat them a little bit too. It's not quite as necessary now. I'm going to start my cream soup. You could have made a red chowder, like I said, if you had cooked these, or a potato soup and you just want vegetables in it, that's fine too. If you have roasted potatoes that you do in the oven, you can save them for your soup as well. Put some butter in here because I'm going to make a roux right now. I know we're running a little over time, you guys. I hope you forgive us. Soups are— there's a lot to them. If you have to come back later and watch it on replay, I understand. But almost done, actually, too. Really not far. You notice I didn't use my fingers today on the butter.

I was watching for that. I'm disappointed.

Well, you know, sauté, I use my fingers. Soups, I actually cut them or spoon them. It's a strange— I'm a strange person. So anyway, now I'm melting my butter in here. Potatoes are in. They're going to get a little sweated too. You'll notice there's a little bit of brown on the bottom of the pan. That's flavor too. That's going to come up a little bit. You don't want it to burn. That's a nice caramelization. When I hit it with the stock, then it's going to start to come up. Put in just a little bit more butter. If you don't want to use butter, you can make a roux out of just oil. French will just die if you tell them you're doing that, or any Cajun cook. I'd probably die if you caught me doing that. But you can make it with oil. I have not tried it with vegan butters, so I don't know if you can. I mean, your dairy changes that you can use are really easy if you want to not use dairy for cream soups. And I really don't use much dairy in mine, but you can use different soy milks or almond milks or whatever you like to use.

You know what I was wondering? Chef, Land O'Lakes makes a fat-free half-and-half. How is that as a thickener, as a substitute for cream?

You'll see I'm not using a whole lot. You can use that if you want to keep it down a little bit, but you're not going to add the flavor, and flavor comes from fat, unfortunately. So it's going to be— you could try it. But I mean, it's— you know, if you're going to use skim milk anyway, try it as long as it's fat-free. But you're not going to get as much flavor, and it's not going to change the texture the same way. So now I'm going to add in a little flour. And the rule of thumb on flour is when you're making a roux is you want to take most of the shine off of the You know, if I was making a gallon, a big pot, it would be a pound of butter, a pound of flour, a gallon of milk, or a gallon of stock, kind of a thing.

Okay, and we have a question from Susanna, forgive me, Kawhi. Chef, do you always buy organic produce, organic vegetables, "fruits and organic meat. What produces do you recommend we buy organic?" Good question.

You want to buy anything that grows in the ground is your first big thing. Anything with a thin skin is also a good choice. Berries, if you can buy them organic, are good things to buy organic. Something like a banana, you don't really have to because it's got such a thick skin. There's actually a list of the dirty dozen. Dozen, I think, of the vegetables that you really need to avoid. You need to buy organic. If you Google that, you'll see what's recommended and what changes. Mushrooms, I think, are on the Clean 15, and because of how they're grown, they really never see anything bad. But I try to buy them whenever I can. In all honesty, sometimes it's price. I try to buy my meats either organic or free-range whenever I can because they taste better. Honestly, that's why. All right, now moving on to the next step is the stock. And when you're doing a cream soup, now you want to let this cook a little. You have to be careful that it doesn't burn, otherwise your roux— and this roux is actually getting a little dark. It's gone from a blonde roux to a darker roux, and for cream soup, you really want it to be more of a light blonde roux, so you have to watch.

It looks savory. It looks like so savory.

Okay, now what I did was I took an ear of corn, I cut all the corn off, I threw a cob in the water and I boiled it because I'm going to make a corn chowder. I just pulled the cob out of here. Now I'm going to add this hot stock, and I'm going to try and hold back most of the corn, but if some falls in, it's not a big deal. I'm going to put my hot stock in. This is where the stock really needs to be hot. It can't be cold because you'll have problems. I'm going to put my hot stock in here. Turn this up a little a little bit more, and it's going to start to look a little like mashed potatoes.

Yeah, okay, there's such an art, and this is so helpful step by step. There's such an art.

Okay, now once we get it to this stage, and cooking a roux, uh, on how to cook it, you want it to smell, start to smell a little bit like baking bread. That's when you know the flour is cooking. So now that I've got it to stage. And it's actually— if it didn't have all those vegetables in it, it would be called a velouté. And if you were making it without the vegetables, you could make a cheese sauce, you can make a mushroom sauce, you could make turkey gravy, whatever you're making. But this is how we make our cream soups. And if I put broccoli in, if I had a pot of broccoli cooking, a pot of spinach cooking with the water, whatever vegetable you like at that point. So now I'm going to add in more liquid, and I'm going to add in my corn that came into the pan too. Now, if you're learning this at first, do it in a little bit smaller batches. I've been doing this a long time, so I could even do it with cold water, but it's not recommended, especially if you're not sure from looks. A lot of it has to do with how it looks as it's thickening.

It's looking good from where I sit. It's looking great.

A little bit of a corn— very thick corn chowder. Now I'm going to add a little bit of thyme in here. I haven't tasted it yet, but I'm going to do that. So now this is basically done. I have not added any dairy other than the butter into it. No milk products. This is your creamy soup. It's a little thick now, and it will thicken more. What you want to do is you just want to add more stock into it. You saw I had the vegetable stock. This would be where you would put your vegetable stock in and taste it to make sure it's not getting too salty. Add your stock in and watch it. Keep it on low. Let it simmer. As it cooks and thickens, you can thin it out a little bit more. When it sits in your refrigerator, it's gonna thicken some more too, so just be aware of that.

And when do you add the salt? I didn't see you add salt.

I put salt in the vegetables.

Okay, I must have missed that.

I sprinkle them with a little salt and a little pepper when the veggies were sweating. So now is when I add my cream. That's it. Okay?

Wow, that's, huh.

Okay? So—

Is that about a quarter cup, a third of a cup?

Maybe a half at tops.

Okay.

All right, and I'm going to add a little more stock in this as it sits because it's going to be really too thick. But all I'm doing is I'm changing the color and I'm changing a little bit of the mouth texture when I'm eating it. It's smoothed out now, and that's all I really need. When I would make a 5-gallon pot, I would use one of these. So how much cream is really in there? Of course, I probably used 3 pounds of butter too, but we won't talk about that. That's interesting.

That's so interesting, Chef, because when you hear of creamed soups, I have always assumed that there's a ton of cream in it.

You can. The problem with a ton of cream in your soups— I'm just going to turn this off and come back to here. The problem with adding a lot of cream in your soups is you'll start to get this flavor, this gummy kind of sensation and flavor in your mouth when you're eating. You know, you think, wow, the more cream I use, the richer and better the soup is going to be. And that's not always the case, because as you start to add it in, you'll actually get that cream— because if, let's say, you drank a tablespoon of cream, what's it going to taste like? It's not going to be ice cream. It's not going to be that delicious flavor that you associate with whipped cream. It's going to be a very thick coating going down your throat into your mouth, and it's not going to really be a real pleasant sensation after you're done eating it. So when you use too much cream, that's basically the same thing you're going to do to the soup. It's not really going to give it that real pleasant— now, instead of the broth, I could have used milk. If you want to use nonfat milk at that stage or 1% milk at that stage, you could. Or if you want to use half milk and half stock, that's okay too. So, you know, either way you want to do it is fine. Have fun with it. And like I said, now I could have— I also have— let me show you this real quick. I have a tool that I love. I think I may have shown it once or twice before, but this is an immersion blender. All right, this little baby, when you plug it in, you turn it on, these little blades in the bottom, it's like a portable blender.

I think a chef could be dangerous with that.

Well, let me tell you, I had one that was taller than me that I needed a ladder to to use.

Wow.

The big stock pot, because we had one of these huge cookers, and it was— we had to hang it up. It was actually about this big. It was amazing. But that, like, say I wanted to puree everything in here and then strain it and have a very smooth soup. Yes, I could do that. I would hit it with the immersion blender and just blend it all up. I use that with canned beans lots of times and use them as thickeners because then my wife can't see that there's beans in there when I'm making a regular soup.

So then it's really like a silk, real silky texture.

Yeah, and it thickens it up. You know, there's some natural thickeners. Uh, okra is a really good natural thickener if you're making a vegetable soup. Like I said, if you have leftover mashed potatoes, throw them in the freezer Dump them in, just let them thaw. I'm not telling you to put them all in frozen. If it's a stock soup, you can throw regular veggies in there, and tomatoes, too. If you have cut tomatoes or tomatoes that are getting weepy, freeze them. Soup, really, that's what it is. If you like grains, throw some of your favorite grains in there. Lentils are wonderful. Brown rice, got to cook it a little bit longer.

Wow. When I think of how much food I throw out, and I'm sure many families throw out. It can just be reused and in a delicious, delicious way. I think I'm going to get more Ziploc bags.

That's it. If you don't want to spend money using Ziplocs, then save some of your little plastic containers the food comes in that you can dump in there and freeze. Just don't keep them in there for months at a time so it's all freezer burned and ruined. Keep it towards the front where you can see it. And just say, you know, Saturday night is soup night. You know, it was always like, what do we have? What do we have going bad? Not going bad, but what do we have that's not really great that we can make soup out of? You know, that was always what you look for. What can't we use anymore? What has made its way around enough that we can't use it anymore? Now sometimes you get vegetables that are just shot. I'm not telling you to save them. If they really stayed hot too long and they got all mushy and flavorless, maybe you don't want to use them. Once they're cooked, I wouldn't save them for stock anymore because you've cooked the flavors that you want out of them.

Great, excellent tips. Do you want to go through— I have a few comments. You want to go through?

Absolutely.

Carol White says, "Yes, very simply, yes, fat is the flavor." Yeah, unfortunate as it may seem, there's flavor in fat. Yep, and you know what, it bears repeating. A lot of this bears repeating. A lot of these tips are so basic and simple that really bear repeating. And Nazim says, beef stock and ravioli, had it last night. You were talking earlier about stocks and how flavorful they are. You know, simple and elegant, maybe with some cheese. What more do you need? Jennifer Steele, such great tips, Chef Dennis, to not let anything go to waste. Love it. And I knew we would find out all about that today, and you really just seem to take that concept off and run with it. I can see the passion behind the show in a lot of ways.

Well, soups were always one of my favorites to make. It was always like a challenge. How can I make it really taste good? Some of the best reactions to food I ever got— I remember taking it to my neighbor one time, and her knees buckled. I went, "Oh my God, are you all right?" She goes, "Oh, that was better than anything I've had in a long time." Those are the reactions you want. Sometimes you get them with soups. It's amazing, the flavors. Now, again, Very big tip. I'm going to make the soup, like say I made it tonight. It's not going to taste as good tonight as it's going to taste tomorrow.

Oh, okay. So that's the same as, you know, chilies and stews and even, even casserole dishes and things like that.

The flavors build as it sits. Like when I make— if I made a soup, usually I would make them at work, and I would make these big 5-gallon buckets, and they would sit. And as they sat, once they cooled off, as they sat in the walk-in in these big buckets, they would start to mature. The flavors would start to build. So by the second day, they were much better. By the third day, they were really, really good soups. And with even French onion, it takes 2 days to make a really good French onion soup. It takes time to build those flavors. They're complex. I'm not saying not to eat it tonight, but I'm just saying make enough so you have enough to freeze. Don't rush to put it in the freezer the same day. Let it sit out for a day before you put it in the freezer, and then freeze it. Let it build some flavors. When I make marinara sauce, it stays in my refrigerator for 3 days before I freeze it. I'll put it in the little containers and get it ready. I make enough so I don't have to make it for a month at a time. It just sits and stays in there.

You know, that's— those are, you know, these tips also fall into our busier lives in the fall and how to plan ahead. And I find that I eat well the most when I plan ahead. So when you put these vegetables away and you make enough sauce, and when I make double, triple batches of meatballs, which I'm famous for in my house, then you can eat well more frequently.

Yeah, and it's not like— everybody has those days. I certainly have them. I come home, and I'm just dead. I haven't left home. I haven't left the computer all day, so I haven't thought about— as Lisa says, "What do we have?" I go, "We got spaghetti." She goes, "Oh, that's fine." That's my fallback, and we'll have it twice a week because we like it. We don't plan to have it. It's never like, "We're going to have spaghetti tonight." It's always like, "Well, okay, I'm tired. It's either go out or I'll make pasta." Then it's a different kind. Then you change that up with different shapes. Maybe I'll throw some ricotta cheese and bake it, or I'll do something else with it. There's still room to go. It's just I've taken some of the work out of it. With these soups, when you cut your vegetables, like I said, if you're freeze them and have them ready. Maybe you got a part of a leftover roast or you bought a chicken at, you know, one of my favorite places to buy roast chicken is Sam's Club. They are the most flavorful and they're like $6. And you take that, what's left over, and make a soup out of it.

That's funny, my son swears by the meat at Costco and he always comes home, he does, he's a big Costco shopper, and he always comes home— also with a roasted chicken.

Roasted chickens are very good, too, and they're very inexpensive. You get them at a grocery store, they're good, but they're going to cost you $2 or $3 more. Talk about being able to feed yourself. You can have a nice meal with the chicken, and then take that carcass, throw that in water, and boil it down some more, and get all the rest of that little meat and fat off of it that you can, and use that as a stock for your soup.

Yep. And another comment, let's see, from Jennifer Steele. Wow, never knew you could use the onion skins for vegetable stock. I never knew that either. I will bet you most of our viewers did not know that. That just makes perfect sense.

You know, growing up in an era where we had stockpots in kitchens, you don't see them anymore because there's just the time and involved in it, and time is money, you don't see them. In the era of that, I'm going to make French onion soup, so I'm going to cut up 50 pounds of onions. All those ends, all those skins, if I threw them away, my boss would have gone ballistic. If I'm roasting prime ribs, I need something to put under it. If I cut up fresh onion—

Wow.

If I cut up fresh carrots to throw underneath of it, and celery, he's going to go, "No." but if I'm using the whole end of the celery, that base, if I'm using all the leaves— and I don't put celery leaves in the soup. Years ago, a guy told me, says they make soup bitter. Whether they do or not, that went in my head, and I'd never put the leaves in the soup. Some recipes you see tells you to use the leaves too, but I just don't do it. All those scraps, whenever I roast a meat, they went under the meat. The juices would cook down on top of it and through it. Now, when I lift that roast out or that prime rib out or whatever I was cooking, that chicken, I've got all my pan— and I'll add some water to it and put it back on the stove. I'll get all the juices, everything unstuck from the pan. That's my pan sauce. That's my pan—

Wow. That is amazing. That is perfect.

That's why you use them.

Yeah. This one show on soups, who knew from the fundamental of chopping to saving every little bit and why and how. It was terrific. What's next? Show us what you have there.

That's it. I'm not going to eat this tonight. Lisa's actually away. She's in Philadelphia. I'm going to thin this out a little bit more. I'm going to put some vegetable stock, and I didn't make my vegetable stock ahead of time. All I used was the corn. Let me taste it, too, just to see where it's at. I have a spoon here. Okay.

But now those carrots aren't cooked, so—

Yeah, they're cooked.

They are?

Oh yeah, they're cooked. Thing to remember: we have teeth. Everything doesn't have to be mush yet. We're gonna get to that point in our life sooner or later., but right now we still have teeth. The carrots actually, they were small enough that they cooked up pretty fast. Potatoes aren't quite done. Okay, the potatoes need to cook a little bit more. This is, this is not quite done. It needs to have a little more stock in it. It needs to simmer for a little while.

Okay, so how did it taste?

It was— I could taste the corn, and that's what I wanted to see. Yeah, so I could take— now I could have cooked more corn If you do corn and you have those husks, I'm not telling you to freeze them, but maybe you want to make a corn chowder when you have them. Save those husks that you've cut— not that you've eaten, not the ones you've all eaten at the table. But if you're doing fresh corn, sautéing fresh corn, or if you're making a corn relish or something with the corn, save those husks, make a little corn stock with them, and use it in a soup if you're going to do that.

Oh man, there's so many jokes about the family putting together all their corn husks. The family that, you know, eats corn chowder together, you know, does everything together.

Cool. We've gone over time, but I hope you forgive us. I didn't think it was going to take this long, honestly. I thought it was going to be a quicker show, but it was a lot. We covered a lot.

We sure did. We sure could. So thank you so much. Thank you everyone for hanging in there. And what a wonderful dish. Thanks, Chef.

And I'll see you all next Monday. We'll have something, we'll start delving into maybe some of the fall things for us to make.

Harvest.

Harvest.

Harvest time.

Harvest time. I'll see you all later. Bye. Bye-bye.