Читать книгу The Student Cookbook - Sophie Grigson, Sophie Grigson - Страница 25

Making soup is all about extracting the maximum flavour from a set of ingredients. Certain techniques, like sweating vegetables and thickening or thinning the soup, are essential to a good result, while others, like stock-making, can be circumnavigated but are worth learning because they have the potential to turn a pedestrian but acceptable soup into a first-rate one. If you want to get the best soup on to your table, read these tips and techniques before you get out the saucepan.

First, a word about the basic structure of a soup. Most soups start off with a group of base ingredients (e.g. onion, garlic, butter or olive oil) that give the soup a background flavour. The main ingredients are what give the soup its predominant flavour – carrots, perhaps, or parsnips, or a medley of vegetables and beans.

Aromatics are the complementary ingredients that scent or spice the soup – usually herbs and spices. The commonest of these is a ‘bouquet garni’ which is a bundle of different herbs, tied together with string so that it can be easily removed before liquidising or serving the soup (see page 20).

All soups need some sort of liquid otherwise they wouldn’t be soups at all! And then last, but not at all least, they need to be seasoned with salt and pepper, or maybe cayenne pepper for a dash of colour and heat combined.