Healthy Cooking for the Jewish Home: 200 Recipes for Eating Well on Holidays and Every Day by Faye Levy

Author:Faye Levy [Faye Levy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: food.cookbooks
ISBN: 9780060787844
Google: 2i-Sj9egB50C
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 10338374
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2008-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

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TWO-STEP SOUPS

At my cooking classes in Paris, we often made vegetable soups. Even when preparing simple soups, we were taught to take a little extra care so they would be attractive and elegant.

To make creamy broccoli soup, we cooked broccoli florets in broth, then pureed them and added cream to make a pale green pottage. For garnish, the chefs instructed us to lightly cook extra broccoli florets in another pot of boiling water. We had to drain them quickly, rinse them with cold water to keep their color bright, and then drain them again. At serving time, we briefly dunked the broccoli florets in boiling water to reheat them, then drained them once again, and added some to each bowl of soup. The florets stayed on top of the thick soup and made a colorful decoration.

We were training to become professional chefs. To traditional Jewish home cooks, preparing matzo balls for such a soup makes sense, but making a separate vegetable garnish might appear impractical and even frivolous, unless you’re serving the creamy soup on a holiday like Shavuot or Sukkot. Yet the vegetable garnish has other benefits besides adding visual appeal. When you cook vegetables long enough to make a tasty soup, they give much of their flavor to the water to turn it into broth, but the vegetables themselves become a bit tired. A garnish of briefly cooked, crisp-tender vegetables gives a lively flavor and provides a pleasing contrast with the smooth texture of the soup.

I have adopted a compromise—a way to make use of the classic technique without having to clean extra pots. This alternative method also conserves the vegetables’ vitamins. It is easy to use for both smooth and chunky soups.

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