23.2 Broth soups

Clear soups are soups with no thickener: broths, consommés, and soups built on broth. The broth-based group takes in any soup made with broth, such as minestrone, chicken tortilla soup, French onion soup and the Vietnamese soup pho.

More on consommé

A consommé is a clear soup made from a rich stock or bouillon, cleared with egg whites so that fat and sediment are left behind. Simmering does the work. The acid in the tomatoes of the clearmeat helps pull the cloudiness out of the liquid, and the egg-white protein gathers the solids into a raft on the surface. Once the raft has formed, lower the heat and let it simmer gently until the flavor is where you want it, which usually takes from 45 minutes to over an hour.

• Color: beef or veal gives a rich amber; poultry gives a very pale yellow.
• Meat: leave the cartilage and tendons on. Their gelatin gives the soup a fuller feel in the mouth. For beef or veal, shin is the cut to use: very lean and full of gristle. That makes it a poor choice for most dishes but almost a must for consommé. Grind it very fine.
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• Taking off the last fat: chill the consommé and lift the fat off with cheesecloth, or pour it into a wide, shallow pan and draw broad strips of parchment paper across the top. The last specks of fat stick to the paper.
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• Cost: a little consommé takes a lot of meat. Some recipes use as much as 500 g (just over a pound) of meat for one 250 mL (8.2 fl. oz.) serving.
• Service: serve it piping hot, because it cools faster than other soups and starts to set like jelly. A garnish can be as simple as a splash of sherry or an egg yolk, or cut vegetables, or royales, small shaped savory custards. A tomato consommé, by tradition, is served chilled, which keeps it clear.
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The oignon brûlé, French for "burnt onion", is an onion cut in half and charred. It goes into stocks and sauces, as well as the clearmeat, for flavor and color.

French onion soup

Onion soup goes back at least to Roman times. For most of its history it was a dish of the poor, because onions were cheap and grew easily. The version known today comes from Paris in the 18th century: beef broth with caramelized onions.

Recipes differ a great deal, but they agree that the onions must cook slowly until they caramelize to a deep brown. Brandy or sherry goes in at the end. A slice of bread, the croûte, often sits on top, and is often finished in a ramekin under the grill with croutons and melted Gruyère. see chapter 17: Bulb onions

Pho

Pho is a street food in Vietnam and the speciality of restaurant chains around the world. It began in northern Vietnam early in the 20th century, and refugees spread it abroad after the Vietnam War.

A bowl holds a particular cut of flat rice noodles in a clear beef broth, with thin slices of beef such as steak, fatty or lean flank, or brisket. In southern Vietnam it may come with slow-cooked tendon, tripe or meatballs. Chicken pho uses the same spices as the beef kind, but its broth comes from chicken bones and meat and some of the bird's insides, such as the heart, the gizzard and undeveloped eggs. At a pho stall in Vietnam, the cook usually asks which parts of the beef you want and how you want them cooked.

Two more broth soups

• Avgolemono is a Greek egg and lemon soup, also called Greek chicken soup. Liquid from cooking chicken or fish is combined with eggs and lemon juice, and small pieces of chicken are often added, which makes it something like a lemony cream of chicken. As a soup it usually holds a filler such as rice, and it is thinner than the sauce of the same name.
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• Posole (pozole in Spanish) is a thick, stew-like soup of pork and hominy, eaten in Mexico and Central America. Hominy is dried corn soaked in lime or lye; posole is another name for it.
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Portioning with a ladle

Soup is portioned with a ladle, and the size stamped on the ladle tells you how many servings a quart will give. see chapter 5: Ladle sizes

Ladle sizes and servings per quart.