Last year we decided to explore the world of soups. What we did as randomly select a country, looked up their national soup dish, found a recipe, shopped for the ingredients, then made it. Here are our entries!
What got us started on our quest, was that I made Broccoli Gruyere Soup from the Modernest Cuisine at Home book and it is absolutely delicious. That got us thinking, “We need more soups!” and that is how it started. Here is the Broccoli Gruyere Soup.
Avgolemono is probably the easiest, tastiest and most delicious soup we made. It’s a classic Greek soup that everybody should have in their wheelhouse. A real pleasant egg lemon flavor profile that just goes on. It’s the best version of chicken soup we found.
Borscht is another great tasty sour soup, and one that I remember from my childhood. Super delicious dish form Ukraine.
Next we went to Poland for Chlodnik. This is a soup that can be served hot or cold, and we chose cold. It’s basically a beet soup that carries that sourness that is so moreish.
After that, we needed something different and luckily our randomizer landed on France! French Onion Soup is one of my very favorites!
After France our randomizer landed in China where Hot and Sour soup was our choice. It is actually a wonderful soup that uses ingredients that are quite different from soups in the west. Tofu, bamboo shoots and mushrooms including tree ears etc. The “hot” part is largely due to white pepper. That was a surprize. It is super delicious though.
After China we ended up in Turkey. I had never heard of Kirmizi Mercimek Corbasi. It’s a soup made with red lentils and finished with olive oil steeped Aleppo pepper with roasted garlic. It’s quite yummy.
Nest we ended up in Malaysia where Laksa is the soup of choice. Oh my, talk about delicious!
These are the fixings for Laksa
After Malaysia we ended up in India where Mulligatawny Soup was the order of the day. Mulligatawny soup means “pepper water,” and curry is the particular ingredient that gives this incredible dish such a delicious flavor. We love Indian food, so it was wonderful to add this soup to our repertoire!
Our next kitchen was Filipino! Pork Sinigang is a delicious Filipino sour soup dish. The soup is made from any cut of pork along tomato, string beans, spinach, and tamarind. Some of the ingredients like water spinach, egg plant, daikon radish, string beans and okra were quite interesting and it is a very tasty meal.
SeolleongtangĀ is a Korean milky beef bone soup that’s made by boiling down ox leg bones for several hours until the broth becomes rich and creamy white.It’s quite time consuming, but a yummy flavor when all is said and done.
After that, we landed in Canada, and selected a Split Pea with Ham soup, which was lucky since we are craving it!
The next country that came up was Thailand, where the obvious choice was Tom Kha Gai! I LOVE Thai food, and this is a truly epic soup.
After Thailand we ended up in Japan where we made Tonkotsu Ramen. This is a very labor intensive soup, but OH MY is it delicious.
Finally, we landed in America where my famous Turkey Carcass soup is the soup of choice. I look forward to making it each and every year!
My Life: A Memoir 