Hi everyone, welcome to potluck food talks. Today we're going to talk about soups. What's the deal with soups, Phil? Soups. I don't know, soups are tasty. Soups are good for you. Soups are really good for you. Do you have any favorite soups or moments where you really think that you would like to have a soup? I have them saved in my memory under soup moments. Oh really?
No. I was going to say I have the same, you know, when it's rainy and sad, you really feel like having a chicken soup for the soul. Yeah, I do have favorite soups. I particularly like gazpacho and samorejo. You know, I know they're different, but I like ajo blanco, you know, that direction. Yeah. And although I'll probably be chased with pitchforks, I think they kind of fall in the same category as sort of like fresh chilled tangy vegetable based soups.
Okay, like cold cream soup, but with cooked vegetables. That's what you mean. Yeah, but not necessarily with cream, but I like, I do sort of like chilled vegetable soups, like especially in like late spring and summer a lot, you know. Like cold bichisua for instance. Yeah, exactly. Like whether it's, you know, cucumber of, you know, really like a sort of like really sharp cold cucumber soup.
Ah yeah, you know like this, I think it's from Hungary, I think it's called tarator, that is like a cucumber yogurt mint soup, a cold one. Ah, I didn't notice, but that sounds delicious. Yeah, something like that, you know, or like I used to make one out of. Well, now that I just checked for it and it's actually a sauce. Oh yeah. Is it a sauce or a, no, it is a soup. It is a soup. Yeah, yeah. And it's from Bulgaria, not Hungary.
I see. Yeah, I mean a sauce with enough imagination can become a soup, you know, if you're brave enough. Sure. Yeah, or a cream soup, if you just make it thicker, it can become a puree, you know, like it's just a matter of consistency, of texture. Yeah. You don't seem to agree on that. No, no, of course, of course, absolutely.
I think the line between, you know, making something thinner and drinking it as a soup rather than a sauce, it can very quickly go from, oh, this is a really good idea to you're a psychopath. I think if you start drinking, if you start drinking gravy or vanilla sauce, you know, a creme anglaise, as some people might maybe suggest, no fingers pointed. But I mean, if you add water to a gravy, that will become kind of like a stock, right? That you can use like as a soup base.
It's not like, I mean, it's not like the most orthodoxical thing or best idea. I don't know. Yeah, that's the thing, you know, like I agree with your theory. The practical side kind of makes me, you know, if I saw somebody do that, you know, just be like, oh, I'm just going to take this gravy and just put some water out soup and then drinks it. I'd be like, oh, add some water and some vegetables. I don't know. I'd slowly move away towards the nearest exit.
But I mean, also puree is, it's super common here in Spain that you call puree is a very thick soup and you eat it with a spoon like, you know, like from a bowl. Like a potaje. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, that's true. I have to tell you, I grew up in Spain eating potaje de verdura in the school canteen and I'm still traumatized by that.
Like, because they used to, they used to force you to eat everything, you know, and like it was like just this bland, horrible, brown sludge of cooked vegetables, you know, it was really, really awful. It's still to this day because potaje can be really nice. But like when I smell like potaje, I'm like, I get shivers. But going back to gazpacho, do you have any like hints or tips on how to make gazpacho or any preferences?
What I do often, I take the ingredients and I marinate them. So like if I, for example, if I have like tomatoes and stuff, or I say I have tomatoes, garlic, spring onion, like I'm just making something up, spring onion, you know, blah, blah, blah. And say, you know, I don't know, some herb, a little bit of coriander or whatever. I know it's not traditional, so don't come after me. But they got the paella now since they're listening right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're going to Jamie Oliver use.
Exactly. So we need a Spanish version of Uncle Roger, Spanish version of sort of like, what's he doing? Yeah, anyway, but like I take the ingredients, I cut them and I like marinate them in a bowl. So like I'll add the salt, maybe some sugar, a dash of vinegar, and I'll just let them macerate before I blitz them all and stuff. That's what I do, you know, even with the olive oil and everything that I'm going to add, maybe not the bread.
But yeah, that's what I do. And I feel like it kind of releases the juices from the vegetables and kind of helps it. Yeah, that's a very good practice to do that. Like with gazpacho, I have like something that I've learned that people from abroad usually do wrong is that adding too much of everything. I think a gazpacho should be like 80% tomato or your base. If you're making it with strawberries or watermelon or whatever, that should be like at least 80%.
And things like onion and garlic that should be like super little, like almost nothing. Because I've seen people like adding a whole onion and a whole cucumber and then you have like this mixed salad and okay, that can be super healthy, but it doesn't get the right taste of a gazpacho, you know? Yeah, for sure, for sure. I mean, a whole onion is just like you want to, you know, you want to add accents of stuff, you know.
Exactly, exactly. And here the ones that you can buy from the supermarket, I really like the one that is without cucumber. For some reason, I think it just tastes better. Like, I don't know why it has like less bitterness. And the other thing that I think it's for me, it's relevant for a gazpacho to get like the distinctive flavor is the sherry vinegar, in my opinion.
Yeah, for sure. I think this like tart vinegar, like touch is really important. Gazpacho really is a thing that really is made or broken by seasoning it correctly, I think. Also, like there, you know, gazpacho is really important that you push the salt and you push the vinegar spike and that everything's kind of like in balance.
Because otherwise, it's just kind of like a little bit like, but like I've eaten gazpachos where it really like made me stop and I was like, man, it's so delicious, you know? And with those simple things, that's like the most, the coolest thing. If you eat something like a samorejo, you know, which is like almost no ingredients, you know, and you eat it and you're like, man, this is absolutely delicious. And it's just because it's made really well and seasoned really, really well.
And what about doing gazpachos with cooked vegetables? Have you done that ever? Like cooked tomatoes or these kind of things? And then seasoning it like a gazpacho and you have like a cold soup, but with cooked vegetables, which is like something where the gazpacho Nazis go really crazy. But yeah, I mean, it's like a valid cold soup. I haven't done that actually. And with like really good results.
Also like the one thing that I can remember, I made a gazpacho where I used part just like normal raw tomatoes and then a big part of roasted red peppers that I just like brushed with olive oil, salt and just like roasted in the oven until they were really kind of like soft and mushy caramelized. And that gave a super nice sweetness and really nice like roasted pepper flavor. Afterwards, it works really, really well.
Yeah. The first restaurant where I worked, we would like to like this kind of gazpacho, but just for the reason that it would last longer. That was the only criteria behind it. It was just like a business decision. What about Asia? I was talking in Asia with John Reggevall and I remember we were eating this noodle soup and some street food vendor place.
And I remember him saying, this is so underrated in Europe. Like just having like a nice broth, strong flavor with noodles. And that's it. There's your soup. And there are millions of variations that you can do with that. Yeah, for sure. Like Asia has such a crazy soup culture. You know, if you think of, you know, with these amazing like beef broths and more like, you know, China, which did like, I mean, like a million different soups and broths.
But like Japan, I had that experience in Japan where I really sort of like discovered like the dashi culture. Oh, yeah. And where I remember like what like the beginning time when I moved to Japan, because also the temperature is different. Like soups are served boiling hot in Japan, you know, or they should be anyway. It's like you take this boiling broth and you take the first zip and it like goes through your entire body, you know, like that feeling.
And that's something that is really ingrained. And like I feel like in the Asian cooking culture, like mentality, that is kind of missing in the Western world. I mean, in Japanese like Kaiseki restaurants, you know, you have the dashi course, you know, the soup course, where often you get like an ichiban dashi. Ichiban dashi being like the... That's the cold one.
No, no, the ichiban dashi is... So when you have katsuobushi, the first infusion, because often you can do like one infusion, you strain it off, you can do a second infusion, which then often is used for cooking. Exactly. Is that the strongest, the purest dashi? Exactly. Yeah. And, you know, where the dishes are kept super, super simple. And I mean, the dashi, there's, you know, it's so simple.
There's hardly any ingredients in there. But exactly because of that, the like the balance, the products, like the ingredients and the execution, they have to be perfect. I mean, anybody who's tried to make dashi at home and has never done it, has probably had a really difficult time replicating a dashi that they've had at a restaurant, because it's just not that easy.
Right? Because it's like very fickle. It can go wrong really easily and you need to have really good ingredients. You need to understand those ingredients. And if you don't get the balance right, suddenly you have this really horrible, horrible broth. Yeah. And also dashi is so versatile. Have you ever done like risotto with dashi or these kind of things? Risotto with dashi? Probably. I've done a beurre blanc with dashi, like a katsuobushi beurre blanc. That was quite nice.
Oh, nice. That sounds really good. With like this like little smoky ham flavor of the katsuobushi. When I was in Mugaritz, they had this dish. It was a piece of foie gras on a dashi broth with raw cherries on top. That was funny. Amazing. Oh, that sounds really good. That sounds nice. Yeah. Well, in Germany, when I was working in restaurants in Berlin, it was super common to have like a daily soup in a restaurant.
That's super common to have that. And it's usually this cream soup. You know, like a very liquid puree. And Germans love it with cream. Yeah, I do too. I'm not such a fan of these creams. There was also this time where they would call it cappuccino and put some, you know, like this air on top of the cream soup, like mushroom cappuccino and these kind of things.
Honestly, there was a time in fine dining when you arrived at the table, the first like course or like the amuse-bouche that you would get would be like a cream soup that was foamed up in like a little espresso cup. Exactly.
And I have to say that I really liked that. Like, yeah, I do. Like it was often really terrible. But I remember a situation where I was a kid when we like my parents took me to like nicer restaurants where we had those soups and like a nicely made cream soup, for example, like a celeriac cream soup, right?
Or like a nice leek or like a nice vichy swath, you know, but like nicely made, good texture, really fine, really nicely seasoned, you know, and then foamed up and you drink it and you're like, and it just like coats your mouth and it's just delicious. And I think it's really cool. I like it. I think we should bring back the cappuccino.
And also these creams, these are so incredibly easy to do. It's just basically just boiling some vegetables and creaming them up. I just recently did like a celeriac cream soup with potatoes and truffle. And that's one of my battles. Oh yeah, that's a Yeah. I always do that like for when I have the ingredients available, like for celebrations and so on, people go crazy because it's like something completely different and aromatic.
I mean, that's a winning combination. It's such a classic combination. Celeriac, potato and truffle is so good. You know, when I was at the Basque Culinary Center, I recreated this dish from Daniel Berlin in Sweden, where he has the celeriac that he roasts for like hours and hours and hours until it's super black.
And he serves that with a sauce that's made from like the celeriac from the day before, like roasted celeriac and blah and I made this like, because it's grilled, it's like a little bit smoky. And I made this really classic sort of sauce, you know, like sweating down leeks and onions and a little bit of garlic. You know, the celeriac in there, like a stock made from the celeriac skins.
And then just a dash of cream made it really light. So like when you like foam it up, it's like really frothy and man, and just like that, it's like a thing that kind of like, okay, you can make a celeriac cream soup. But if you get the base nice and you cook it nicely, a soup can be like amazing, you know, it's like making sauces. It's easier than making sauces, but it's the same thing where sort of like if you get the balance right, it's just super, super good.
Exactly. It's just understanding the balance. For instance, this one, this celeriac cream soup, I usually make like at least 70% celeriac to 30 potatoes, like that kind of balance. And what about fish soups? That's a complete new world, a different world, like from what we've been talking so far. Yeah. Have you tried the fish soup from Elcano? I've never been to Elcano.
Oh, you haven't? Okay. Well, they give you this fish soup that is dark brown, you know, it's from roasted fish bones from all the fish that they have, and it's like a super deep fish flavor. It's incredible. It's like a must if you go there. Oh, that sounds really good. And also all this bones are roasted and charcoal, you know, like which makes it even better.
That sounds super nice. Yeah, I love, you know, like making a good fish soup is not easy. I think it's one of the most difficult soups to make. You know, like making a nice bouillabaisse, I think it's not easy at all. And you never see that in restaurants anymore. I mean, you live in a place where, you know, you are spoiled by good seafood and lots of seafood restaurants. But like, I feel like restaurants nowadays that are not at the coast, like you never see a fish soup anymore. It's a shame.
Yeah, and a bouillabaisse is also like an expensive soup. Like if you want to get a good one in Marseille, I haven't been there, but I have a friend that is from there and he told me like you have to pay quite some money for it. Yeah, which it shouldn't be because it used to be leftover, like not leftover fish, but like rockfish, you know.
Exactly, but like a proper, proper one, you should be using like many different types of fishes and also saffron, you know, like, and also the know-how, like you're charging for all of these things. Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, but also like making, like we used to make like a fake bouillabaisse and the same restaurant where we would make gazpacho with cooked vegetables. And this one we would like, it was basically kind of like a cream soup with different vegetables.
And when the fish balls and everything, then we would like blend it and strain it and then bring it up to point with pasties. And I remember that with that soup is where I learned to put salt, you know, like where you add and taste, add and taste until you have the proper amount. Also the point of, you know, spiciness, this one had a little bit of hot sauce, which is not French at all, but this was like a Caribbean bouillabaisse. Sounds good.
Yeah, that was like a super interesting process. And this also reminds me, one of my favorite soups in the world is like a Peruvian shrimp soup called Chupé, which is something similar that I just explained, like where you blend all the heads of the shrimps or langosins or whatever you're using, the crustaceans you're using, and then strain it and you have like this powerful crustacean soup, which is amazing. Like a bisque. Yeah, exactly. Like a Peruvian bisque, basically.
That's amazing. That's super nice. Bisque also one of my, bisque is not really a soup. It's more like a sauce. But no? Don't you think? I mean like, it's a matter of use, right? If you eat a sauce like a soup, it becomes a soup. That's very debatable, I think. It's like me saying, you know, like, my favorite soup is if I leave a tub of, you know, chunky peanut butter Ben & Jerry's out on the counter, and then I put a straw in it and drink it. That's my favorite soup.
What is the line between a tomato sauce and a tomato soup? What is the line? Oh, no, you run out of arguments. It's mental stability. That's the line, you know. What about sweet sauces? Have you ever used like a Crayman glass, like a sweet soup? Where you put like, I don't know, like a pear cooked in wine in the middle and you have like the soup around? Yeah, but is it a soup or is it a sauce? That's the thing. Because I've definitely put vanilla sauce around a poached pear. I've done that.
But I would never call it a soup. I mean the moment where you need a spoon to eat it, it becomes a soup. I don't know. If somebody asked me, it's like, could I, I really feel like eating soup. Could you bring me a soup and I'll bring them an Eel Flotton with, you know, or profiterole with chocolate sauce. That's not a soup. I mean, well, first of all, like this analogies of savory courses in the sweet world are just that analogies.
Where you call an ice cream sandwich or, you know, like this kind of thing. Of course it's not really a sandwich, you know. True. Yeah. Of course. What are words anyway, you know. And most importantly, you know, you feel you do whatever you feel like you want to do, you know. Don't let anybody judge you for drinking melted ice cream or watered down tomato ketchup. If that's what you want to do, you know, then do it. Watered down tomato ketchup.
But I've actually had a sweet soup, which was actually a soup in Budapest. Okay. Which I had never seen like that and which was absolutely delicious. And you know, the German dish Rote Krutze. Sounds reasonable, but I'm not sure. So it's basically like a mix of red fruit that's cooked and thickens. Often it's thickened with tapioca pearls. So you have like tapioca pearls in the mix and it's like thick. You usually eat it with vanilla sauce.
And in Budapest, I had something that was similar to that. So it was like red fruit that were kind of cooked in the like cooking liquids, which was like a little bit clear and slightly thickened and chilled. And if I recall correctly, you ate that with, I want to say vanilla ice cream, but I don't really remember. But the thing is that it was like, it was not a sauce. It was definitely a soup because of the consistency. You couldn't have called it a sauce.
But this dislike very sweet, but yet fresh acidic soup, really chilled down of like berries and fruits. It was really, really delicious and really refreshing. And I had never seen a sweet soup like that. Well, also in this recent trip to Asia, we had like our first dinner was in a Cantonese restaurant in Singapore. And for dessert, there was like this also kind of like a sweet soup. It was like a kind of like a aromatized syrup with candied fruits inside.
Oh yeah. So you would eat it with a spoon, something like a typical Chinese dessert. Yeah. That's really nice. That's really nice also. And I mean, I guess, you know, now thinking about it, but they often have a similar thing in Japan with the asuki beans. Oh yeah. In a sort of sweet soup, syrupy sort of situation, which is very nice. What about all this bean stews? Would you call that a soup? Like having, you know, like black beans and you're eating them with a spoon on a...
I mean, a stew is not a soup. Not necessarily. I mean, but you know what I mean? Like alubias, like black beans, you know, like... It really depends, you know, like it's hard to pin down when is a soup a stew, when is a stew a soup, you know, what's the, what's the space. I think it's just a constant consistency. But like, yeah, I really love bean soups. They're one of my favorite things to eat actually.
You know, like a lamb broth, like a really nice lamb and beef broth with like fat white beans in it and like a little bit of vegetables. And I especially like it, you know, the like fennel green, like chopped fennel green on top of that. I love that, you know, lots of black pepper. Yeah, that sounds really good. Well, in Venezuela, there is like a super typical black bean soup. I just recently went to a pop up of Aaron, who is a Venezuelan chef here in San Sebastian.
And he did just that. He said that like the amiz butch was just like a small plate of black beans, like the same way you would have them in Venezuela. He's a Venezuelan chef and also with this sour cream on top, like this just brought me to my childhood. And it was something so simple, you know, you just have three bites of it. And I think like that's really cool what you just said with the cappuccino at the beginning of a menu or in a fine dining restaurant because it really sets the tone.
And it's something like really homey and comfy, like having, you know, like a soup to start a menu. What about onion soup? French onion soup? Overrated. I think it's overrated. Yeah. It's probably one of the best things I cooked when I was a teenager, you know, like when I started cooking things just by myself. And like, yeah, sure, it's okay. It's fine, you know, but I'm not the biggest fan.
But having it like with a dark, strong meat broth and grating it with cheese on top, like the whole thing like that, you say it's like, yeah, okay. I don't know, like, like sure it's nice, you know, maybe I just haven't had the full like the real onion soup experience, but like it's okay. I wouldn't like look at it on a menu and be like, oh yeah, French onion soup. Borsch. Borsch. I really like, I love borsch. Yeah. I've had really good borsch.
When I was in my first year of apprenticeship, when I started cooking, this Russian guy was in passing through the kitchen that I was in and he made borsch one time for some reason. And he made it with roast goose. And which is like not common at all, as far as I know, but it's he was a really good chef and it was super, super delicious. And like a well made borsch is really, really nice.
There's also this soup in Berlin that is kind of like a half, half vegetable cream, half chopped vegetables, like with sausages. Do you know which one I mean? No. Berliner Kartoffelsuppe. I mean, yeah, but that's like a potato soup. Yeah, but with sausages and little pieces of vegetables. I mean, that's, that's very common for a potato soup in Germany. That's not necessarily just Berlin. Yeah, like pieces of sausages and that. I personally really like a potato soup.
Again, it's like one of those things where if it's like well made, it's absolutely delicious. But you just don't get it very well made a lot of the times, you know, which is a shame. But yeah, I could go for that. It's got nostalgia factor for sure. You know? Yeah. All mushroom cream soup, my grandma used to make mushroom cream soup, which I really like. Oh yeah, that's amazing.
Well, I remember when I was working in this restaurant where we would make soups every day, the best seller for some reason was tomato soup, which I think is like, that's something I would never order for instance. True. But I, but I do know that a good potato soup is something really nice. There was a restaurant we would do one which a chef started doing it. And then when we, you know, like wrote the recipe down, he would add red wine to the tomato soup. And it was very good, man. Oh, wow.
I've never heard that. I really love tomato soup. Like, I really like the, one of the few things that I really like from the States. This like thing of eating tomato soup with like grilled cheese sandwich next to it. I think that's really great. I love that. I actually just remembered a really outstanding soup that I had last year. It's one of the tastiest things I ate throughout the year. And it was in a restaurant in Berlin called Barra.
And old food was very nice, but they had a soup on, which was just a small cup of soup, but it was like by far the most delicious thing there. It was a sweet corn soup and it was served with toasted hazelnuts, like quite a lot of brown butter, like kind of like swirled on top and margarine. Okay. And it was so fucking tasty, like brown butter, nuts, margarine.
Great, you know, but like the soup was like really smooth consistency, great sweet corn flavor and just like perfectly seasoned, like to the point where it was almost too salty, but just almost. And it was like, it was a perfect example of kind of like just really, really well cooked. And it was like, you know, you eat it and it's you, you left so satisfied. I mentioned red wine, but also adding white wine to cream soups. I think it's a super good idea.
And that's like this layer of acidity and some, some fruity notes, which is cool. Especially with vegetable soups, like vegetables, they're so sweet in general. Unless you're using like a tomato, but if you're using any sort of root vegetables or whatever, or onions, you know, they're very, very, very sweet. You need to sort of like counterbalance it. I also think like a small dash of like a white vinegar. Yeah, for sure.
At the end of a soup, like a white balsamic or like a white distilled vinegar can really lift the soup. I think it's really good. I really like adding a splash of vinegar when I do lentils, for instance. Oh, for sure. For me, it's necessary. Like at the end, you know, adding like a good dash of vinegar.