It is almost impossible to imagine a full-fledged family dinner without soup, because it is he who emphasizes the "home" accent of food. The variety of soups is so great that they cannot bother, 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 preparing soups is diverse, but it has common algorithms.
Classification of Soups
The whole part of the first dishes, called soups, can be divided into several groups having common external characteristics and a similar method of preparation. The culinary tradition has 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.
- Method of preparation: mashed soups, dressing soups, transparent and thickened, as well as sweet.
- The temperature of the dish when serving: hot soups (about 70 degrees when serving) and cold (without cooking, 12 degrees when serving). Combined ones also belong here, for example, the soup was cooked, but served cold.
Dressing soups
It is this category of first courses that is considered the most numerous, as it includes many options:
- National soups: cabbage soup, solyanka (Russia), borsch (Ukraine), minestrone (homeland - Italy), bozbash, kharcho, khash (Caucasus), fo (Vietnam), etc.
- Soups with cereals: for the thickness of the dish, buckwheat, millet, millet, bulgur, rice washed in several waters are added. This also includes legumes soups: peas, beans, lentils are excellent fillers for the first course.
- Soups with flour products. Their diversity is great: with noodles, dumplings, pasta, semolina and sago.
- Vegetable and mushroom soups.
Also, these categories can be divided according to the technology of cooking soups, which in most cases are combined due to several identification landmarks. For example, borsch is a complex vegetable soup, which can also be meat, while it is considered to be a filling and hot soup.
Soups with vegetables, cereals, pasta
All these first courses are united by a similar cooking technology: a soup with pasta is a classic example in order to understand this algorithm. First, the broth is prepared (if the meat soup), then it is filtered to remove small residues of meat and bones, boiled again. Then laid peeled and chopped potatoes, brought to half-preparedness. Soup dressing is prepared in a separate bowl: as a rule, these are vegetables (onions, carrots, sometimes bell peppers, garlic, tomatoes) and spices, passaged in oil (or animal fat). Next, dressing is laid in the soup, after boiling - vermicelli, and three minutes before the end of cooking finely chopped or dried greens. According to the standard technology for preparing hot soups, the products are laid in a liquid based on the time of their preparation:
- Cereals 10 - 25 minutes before the end of cooking.
- Pasta from 8 to 15 minutes.
- Peas and beans are laid at the very beginning, in front of the potatoes, while 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 for dressing, are dipped in the soup raw, not including pickles and sauerkraut. It is also worth emphasizing that immediately after the cooking process is over, 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 prepared on a broth (meat or fish), and sometimes some of the products when cooking the first dish are laid already after partial heat treatment. For example:
- Borsch (beetroot soup). Beets are cut into thin sticks or straws and added to the vegetable dressing in the process, passaging 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 cabbage (if Ukrainian borsch) or after potatoes are almost ready.
- Cabbage soup. Cabbage for this soup is used blanched for 3 to 5 minutes. Thus, excessive bitterness, which is often found in overripe heads of cabbage, is removed from the vegetable.
- Mushroom soup. Usually chopped mushrooms are lightly fried in a small amount of oil before laying in the soup, sometimes with spices that emphasize the special aroma of this ingredient. A similar dressing is sent to the soup after the potato, unless cereals or vermicelli are 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 pickles (sometimes pickled), and in a vegetable dressing, carrots are replaced with white roots (parsley, celery, parsnip and leek). Also, according to the technology of cooking brine soup, you must first boil pearl barley (not rice!) Until half-cooked. The order of laying the ingredients in the soup is practically no different from the general algorithm for preparing soups with cereals:
- Potatoes.
- After 10 minutes - pearl barley.
- Vegetable dressing.
- Pre-stewed cucumbers.
There are several types of pickle: on water, in meat broth, and even with sausages as an additional brew. 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 mashed soups
Pea or lentil, potato and cheese, from a mixture of vegetables, broccoli - all mashed soups that have undergone heat treatment have the same cooking principle:
- The main ingredient is boiled in broth or water: for example, lentils. Often used a combination of legumes and potatoes, onions + carrots + potatoes, poultry liver + potatoes and vegetables. Vegetable dressing is sometimes 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 kind of first course needs to be eaten right after cooking, because literally after a couple of hours it loses its taste appeal.
Transparent soup: the main differences
That kind of soups differs from the rest in that they usually prepare a strong broth (meat or fish), a separate side dish, which, when served or 5 minutes before the end of cooking, is placed in the soup. The most striking example is soup with meatballs, here you can also take the ear and the consomme with scrambled eggs. The technology for preparing a transparent soup is based on the preparation of the broth (usually from bones) and its subsequent clarification ("delay" in the language of professionals). To do this, use slightly whipped proteins, sometimes meat bones or cutlet of beef. The sequence for preparing clear soup is as follows:
- Large bones, chopped into pieces of medium size, a little fry in the oven until golden brown. This will give the broth a richer flavor.
- Pour with cold water and put on a strong fire. Usually 4 liters of water are taken per 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, the fire is made medium or small and the broth is kept 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 rope.
- Strain the cooked broth. Next is the guying process: 1.5 pcs are used for each liter of broth. eggs, which are whipped slightly with a whisk and poured into a stirring broth. Then it is heated intensively.
When the flaky guy sinks to the bottom, the broth can be considered cooked: it is again filtered, 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 fish boiled in it for garnish.
Cold soup without heat treatment
The most famous example is a chatter, cold soup based on fermented milk products. This can be kefir (yogurt), 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 dish, seasoned with spices and spices and poured with chilled dairy product. It is not necessary to insist for a long time - you can immediately serve it to the table.
Mashed soup
The technology for making Gaspacho soup is very similar: its main ingredient is tomatoes, boiled in boiling water and mashed with a blender, along with onions and sweet pepper.
Next, the necessary seasonings, garlic and vegetable oil are added, and chopped bread is also used in some countries. Some chefs recommend wiping the soup through a sieve in order to achieve the perfect consistency, but this is not the case in the classic recipe. This cold soup must be infused in the refrigerator for at least three hours so that the ingredients begin to interact and enrich the aroma.
Sweet Milk Soups
The technology for preparing simple soups based on fresh milk is elementary: the main side dish is boiled beforehand - often it is rice or vermicelli, sometimes buckwheat or millet. Milk with a little sugar and flavorings (cinnamon, vanilla) is boiled in a separate bowl and a side dish is added.
Next, the soup is boiled for 3-5 minutes and served on the table. If vermicelli is used in milk soup very thin (cobweb or rice), then it can be placed in boiling milk without preliminary boiling, since its preparation time is no more than two minutes.
Tribute to civilization
Recently, culinary experiments have come to the point that various “dry” soups, which are sold in every supermarket, have begun to appear. Their peculiarity is that you do not need to boil them - just pour boiling water in a large cup or bowl, mix and wait a few minutes so that the dry mixture absorbs part of the liquid, turning into an aromatic similarity to food. There is no unequivocal opinion whether such food is harmful or healthy, but at the same time everyone understands that it certainly will not replace a rich home-made soup, the use of which there is no reason to doubt.