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.
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.