Dead-of-Winter Vegetable Soup


 

Dean Torges

R.I.P. 11/4/2016
I've learned three important principles in making good vegetable soup, which requires a rich, robust, hearty broth. Brown the bones first and brown them heavily. Add some vinegar to the boiling bones. Don't add tomatoes until the very end.

Everyone has favorite ingredients for soup. Mine don't vary much, though proportions do, and I often switch between barley, egg noodles or whatever other starch I might have on hand. Sometimes I just use corn. Here is how I went about it over the weekend.

Saturday, bought about 20 lbs of beef knuckles and shin bones from local abattoir $2. Enough for two Salvation Army soup lines. Took half the bag, filled two iron skillets with bones and roasted them in a 450º oven for over an hour, until they were chestnut brown. (Roasted about 20 cloves of garlic at the same time, just to eat.) Cut a large venison roast into thirds and browned it heavily in some of the rendered fat in the hot cast iron skillets. Dumped bones and meat into stock pot filled half way with water, added a quarter cup of vinegar to leach out every bit of goodness from the bones, and boiled them most of the day, skimming the first boil. Removed the meat when it was tender.

Added vegetables in the evening: onions, celery, carrots and half a cabbage, and when they were almost tender, added frozen green beans and limas from the garden. Fifteen minutes to go and I added a small, corkscrew pasta in a sufficient amount, and two quarts of home-canned tomatoes burnished to sweet goodness by an Ostrander summer sun.

All day Sunday and Monday I ate vegetable soup. Every time the suggestion of hunger occurred to me, I sat down with a fresh box of Zesta saltines, the salt cellar and the pepper grinder. Tuesday and today I had it, too.

It's what you do when you're dug in. It fortifies the fortress mentality. This ain’t Alaska, fer sure. The sun shines and commerce continues. Nevertheless, I figure this evening if it keeps snowing, I got enough soup for two more days. Which is my way of suggesting that I don’t think it’s possible for vegetable soup, good vegetable soup, life altering vegetable soup, to taste this good in the South.
 
I have one question, Dean. Did you cut up the venison and put it back in the soup, or use it for something else?
 
Jane, I cut the meat up and put it back in the soup near the end. Tender, but not mushy. Mary could do without the meat altogether, but I like it.

Shoulda wrote "a box of fresh Zesta saltines" instead of a "fresh box of Zesta saltines." I love 'em with soup, but not that much.
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Incidentally, I learned of roasted bones and vinegar from Mary's mother, a pretty good backwoods country cook and a maven with iron cookware.
 
PS, bones brown best when you turn them several times during the roast. A pool of grease will rend into the skillet bottom from the bone trimmings and marrow. Turning the bones will expose all sides to browning. The fat will run over them, coating them sufficiently to serve as a baste.

Make sure to use your bbq pair of tongs for this purpose, not a simple kitchen pair. Reason is that if a lge. knuckle slips from your grip, it can create quite a dangerous splatter.

About skimming fat. I use a 4 cup Pyrex measuring bowl and ladle broth and fat from the stock pot into it, carelessly. My ladle just fits into the measuring bowl, so when I have it almost full, I ease the ladle vertically into the bowl and grease pours in from all sides. Fast and simple way to degrease the broth. No waiting for the fat to set up in the fridge, and much easier to wash a measuring bowl than one of those fancy spout-on-the-bottom degreasers that you only use several times a year.

Vote Jim Minion to KCBS Board of Directors
 
Exactly Dean
The basic brown stock is a fond de cuisine, and making a good stock is an art. I mix tomato paste with a bit of water and paint the bones with the the tomato while browning them. I also use a chunk of bacon or salt pork. Oh yeah, I do the bones first then the carrots and onions in the same pan used to roast the bones.
I don't use vinegar, but might try it ... certainly don't want to get on your mother in law's bad side
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I have some chicken stock in progress right now soup sounds good.

morgan
 
And I was noticing some nice marrow bones yesterday while shopping for a client, and with this information, feel much more confident to give it a try. Thanks gentlemen. I've never done a roasted brown stock before, and did take notice on Julia Child's method in The Way To Cook. Very similar.
 

 

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