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To answer your question, yes soup is easy to make, but good soup can be as complex as a full meal. A good soup comes from a good stock and a good stock only com
by kls 7y ago
To answer your question, yes soup is easy to make, but good soup can be as complex as a full meal. A good soup comes from a good stock and a good stock only comes from building it yourself. So you need chicken or beef bones, vegetable pealing, correct spicing, a crock pot and several hours of a low simmer just to build the base. After that you have to build the soup, lets say you are making french onion, one of the simpler classics. You need a good beef stock, you need to select your onions, braise them. Then you need the beef stock you built, you need to select a Sherry or Madeira, you have to select a Gruyere cheese, you then have to simmer this, transfer it to crocks and then broil in the oven.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoLove answers where something is 'easy', then a complex series of step fraught with opportunities for error is given. I remember my brother telling me than Linux was easy to customize (for something; don't remember) then followed 4 pages of line-item build instructions. Anyway, I buy my stock in boxes from the big-box store and its fine. For me.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoThere are tons of things that are easy to do well enough from a practical standpoint but can be made as elaborate as you want to for showmanship purposes. Cooking is one of those things. Look at the "rules" that people who live in 500k houses and drive 50k cars have for using and maintaining cast iron. Some 1930s housewife who was all out of fucks to give most certainly did not go through all those motions when she used an identical pan and it worked out just fine. When GP says "good soup" he/she means soup you can show off (or bring the leftovers in to work as your lunch to show off there) as a status symbol. It may also be good in the practical sense (good tasting, filling, healthy, etc.) but that's secondary to the showmanship aspect of making it.
- kls 7y agoFor me it is not about the showmanship, I am not the type to even take a picture of my food. What I did do though was grow up in a family of good southern cooks on both sides of the family, so I had a foundation in cooking from a young age and developed a taste for quality. I can tell how something is made by tasting it, flavor is all I really care about in food, as such I became interested in developing flavor from a young age. I attended culinary school because of that and though I wanted to be a chef until I got a real job in a commercial kitchen and quickly revised my dreams away from the culinary arts all together. About the only thing I engage in showmanship on when it comes to cooking is BBQ Brisket, I am pretty damn proud of mine as it is a hard art to master.
- kls 7y agoMy point was to highlight that it can be as complicated as you want to make it. It depends on your goals, some people are OK with stock from bullion so people want the flavor of a stock from scratch but most would agree that the latter is going to be far more flavorful and thus considered better. It depends on your goals but soup can be complicated, if your goal is better flavor than run of the mill.