I always look forward to the change of season to Autumn. The crisp cool air, rustling leaves in the wind and colorful foliage make me nostalgic. During this time, we move from summer grilling to the slow-cooked comfort foods of cooler months: pot roasts, spicy chili, crisp roasted chickens and of course, soups. My family loved soups, and I still look forward to soup season because it reminds me of my mother. My mom made great soup, and I learned a lot about how to make good soup from her. Many of those lessons are incorporated into my formulas below and sprinkled throughout our classes at The Chopping Block.
I know many of you will hate me for saying this, but soup really is one of those foods that is best made through a technique-based approach versus following an exact recipe. Soups are a vegetable-forward dish and vegetables have a lot of variables. Are the carrots super sweet or are they relatively bitter? The recipe says two large carrots, and we all know how widely that can vary in actuality.
Please don’t panic! I have instructed many people over the years who simply aren't comfortable with the idea that a recipe isn’t best. Everybody processes differently, and I know many of you may not be comfortable “winging it” when it comes to cooking. I want you to know I understand that, and although this blog is not about a recipe for creamed soups, I think it will offer good insights that will help you navigate a recipe and may leave you empowered to make subtle adjustments to any soup recipe you might come across. These techniques and tips can also help to identify when a recipe is weak so you may choose to bypass it all together.
What is a creamed soup?
I think many people are under the assumption that creamed soups have a lot of cream in them. That should not be the case as a creamed soup's primary ingredient should be white stock (chicken, seafood or vegetable stock) or even water. Creamed soups are finished with a small quantity of cream and sometimes butter.
Soup is basically a sauce, and creamed soups are primarily a sauce named Velouté. There are five Mother Sauces: Tomato, Brown Sauce (sauce made with brown stock), White Sauce (Bechamel, made with cream or milk), Emulsions (Hollandaise, Mayonnaise) and Velouté (sauce made with white stock, fish, chicken, or vegetable). You’ll notice creamed soup is not made with bechamel, which is a cream-based sauce but rather a velouté made with white stock. Why is this? The reason that we don’t use a lot of cream or milk in soup is because it doesn’t have much flavor. A delicious chicken stock or mushroom stock brings a whole lot more flavor to your soup than milk. So, why even bother with the cream… it's bad for you, right? Read on and we will get into more detail on these ideas along with other secrets to the formula for perfect cream soups.
Why the cream?
There is a misnomer that cream and butter make food taste good, but that is not inherently true. Cream and butter add fat and fat's main contribution to soup is texture. The texture that fat offers is an important contribution. Think of fat free salad dressings as an example. Most of the time they are not lacking in flavor but somehow, they leave you void… but of what? If the dressing tastes good, why I am I still left wanting something more? The “more” you are left wanting is the velvety texture of fat.
A creamed soup is generally finished with cream, but cream does not create the bulk of the soup, it creates the texture of the soup. Again, milk or cream doesn’t have a whole lot of flavor, so too much of it can dilute the flavorful parts of the soup. It generally takes a smaller amount of cream or butter to offer its satisfying texture to a soup than you might think, sometimes just a few tablespoons. Adding copious amounts of fat to your soup doesn’t make it better either. Too much fat offers a cloying texture and flattens the liveliness and intensity of the other elements in the soup.
For anyone with high cholesterol or other concerns about eating fat, I’m sorry to say it, but there are no substitutes to fat as far as texture goes. In the salad dressing example, you can certainly get all kinds of wonderful flavor without it and in time most people get used to the lack of velvety texture, especially knowing that their mind and body needs a lean diet. Can you use skim milk? Absolutely, it will bring some flavor and the visual cue of creaminess just not that velvety texture.
Balancing Act of Cream
Another important reason we add cream, butter or other fats to soups is the ability to balance and distribute flavor. The elements of taste: salty, sour, bitter, sweet and umami should all be employed in your soup recipe. The more elements of taste that you use, the more complex your soup will be and in theory, the more exciting it will be to eat. That does not mean that we want all those tastes to be at the forefront of your soup. You want your soup to be very flavorful, but a good soup can also be very subtle. Fat helps in this balancing, it makes the bitter less bitter, the salt less salty and smooths out the acidity by holding and distributing these flavors cloaked in a creamy little blanket.
When making a soup or evaluating a recipe, I want to ensure I am always using all of these elements. I will use more or less of different ingredients depending on what I want to shine in the dish. A well-composed creamed soup should rely on many components of flavor as the base; salt, sour, bitter and umami are all elements that can to be employed to create a complex and flavorful soup base. The cream, butter or other fats can be added to create a velvety texture and distribute flavor but they also can balance a mistake. Fat does a wonderful job at balancing salt, bitterness, acidity and even spiciness. If the body of your soup has a lot of any of these elements, either on purpose or on accident, the fat will help to neutralize these qualities.
Balancing Bitterness
Let’s go back to our fat free dressing example. We discussed the fact that we may miss the mouthfeel that the lack of fat creates but we also miss the balancing element fat plays with bitterness. The reason we put salad dressing on salad greens is in part because they have some degree of bitterness and the fat in the salad dressing balances the bitterness in the greens.
We do an exercise in Culinary Boot Camp and in our Flavor Dynamics class that highlights this. We take a piece of arugula or other salad green, taste it on its own, then drizzle a little olive oil on it and taste it again… the bitterness is magically neutralized! Bring this theory to your soup - say you are making a cream of celery soup as opposed to a cream of mushroom soup. It would make sense that the cream of celery soup might need a little more cream or butter to balance the bitterness of the celery. How much you enjoy bitterness would influence how much cream you finish the soup with. I always add a small amount of cream or butter at the end and taste, then add a little more and taste. I keep doing this until the soup’s bitterness is toned to my liking.
Balancing Acidity
Acidity should always be present in a soup. If there isn’t any acidity in your recipe, I promise you it is one possibility as to why the recipe seems like it is missing something. You want to make the flavor of your soup complex and dynamic and we do this by employing many different flavors in our soups. Salt, bitterness, sweetness, umami and acidity are the tastes we draw upon to create flavor.
Usually, acidity is offered through vinegar, wine or citrus that is added in one of two ways, during cooking process or at the very end. Most European and American style soups flavor profiles lend themselves to adding the acid during the long slow cooking process, so wine and vinegar are best for this method. This allows for the acidity to mellow, generally to the point you cannot at first distinguish that vinegar or wine is in the soup. The acidity is mellowed through the long cooking time.
Then there are Thai, Vietnamese or Latin American soups which often add lime or lemon to the bowl of soup right before serving. This offers a very lively and bright acidity to soups. These techniques are used in both creamed and non-creamed soups, but I generally find a creamed soup without any acidity to balance the richness can fall really flat in flavor.
You might be asking, why would you want to balance the acidity if the point is to add the acidity? Truth is that you may not always want to but know that you can if you feel like it or if the acidity is out of balance. Perhaps life got in the way and you forgot to add the cider vinegar to your borscht at the beginning or you find that that it needs more acidity but the soup is almost done. You might decide to add some vinegar closer to the end than would be ideal and balance its roughness with a bigger dollop of sour cream before serving. Ultimately pairing some level of acidity with creaminess creates a more dynamic and interesting soup.
Balancing Salt
Salt is essential in cooking; its role is to bring out the flavor of everything else. It is also one of the most misunderstood ingredients in cooking, especially in something like creamed soup. The more fat a dish has the more salt it needs. Think of French fries without salt? Cream soups often require a bit more salt than just a brothy chicken soup because they have more fat. If you are on a low sodium diet you might opt for a lower fat diet as well, as lower fat dishes require less salt.
I would be remiss not to highlight one of the most important rules in making soups. Never salt at the beginning or during the cooking process when making soup. Salting soup is the very last step in making soup. The very important reason for this is that soups reduce while cooking, concentrating all of the flavors as they cook (except acidity, which reduces and mellows). If you add salt at the beginning or during the cooking process it is very easy for the soup to become too salty as the volume of soup reduces during the cooking process. If you are using stock that has been salted you can also run into over salty soups, so I recommend using unsalted stock. Also consider things like bacon and cheese, they both add a good amount of salt your soup.
To avoid oversalting, wait until the very end of cooking, right before you are done simmering your soup and will be removing it from the heat before you salt it. When you salt your soup, salt it until your soup tastes delicious and the flavor of the soup has popped. You are not looking to add salt until you tase the salt but rather until the soups flavor has come to the forefront.
Building your Base - The Umami Factor
I usually find that when someone makes soup and they feel like something is missing, it is because the soup doesn’t have enough salt in it, there was no acid added to the soup or the technique in preparing the soup was lacking.
What do I mean by technique? I mean building a good base to the soup. Yes, the flavors are derived from salt, sour (vinegar, wine, citrus), bitterness (largely the vegetables you are using) and umami (the stock). These ingredients support building flavor in your soup but how you cook your soup also affects its flavor.
To get good flavor in your base, some level of sautéing or browning of your vegetables can increase the umami qualities in your soup. If you just throw all the vegetable in your soup without sautéing them, the soup will be waterier in its taste. The more vegetables that are sauteed, the deeper the flavor. The more browned these vegetables are, the deeper the flavor of the base. Keep in mind you may want to deeply brown your mushrooms for a rich cream of mushroom soup, but you might want a very light sauté on the onions for your cream of celery soup. These are decisions that there are no right or wrong answers for, it is up to you in the moment and how you feel but know the sautéing and browning of vegetables intensifies the flavor of the base. Think of French Onion Soup which derives most of its flavor from those caramelized onions.
How long you simmer the soup and how intense the stock is to begin with also affects the base. The longer the simmer time, the more intensely concentrated the flavor becomes. Again, this can be a really great thing in a rich cream of chicken soup but most creamed soups are more vegetable forward and lighter so they don’t require a very long cooking time. A cream of celery soup would likely get murky and bitter if cooked for an extremely long time. I tend to like to use a more reduced intense stock if I want a deep rich flavor in my creamed soups. I don’t want to destroy some of the more delicate vegetables and flavors in a creamed soup by simmering it for too long.
Thickened and Pureed
The texture of a creamed soup is created by fat as we have discussed but also by whether the soup is thickened and/or pureed. The act of pureeing your soup will thicken the soup as well as by adding thickening agents such as flour or cornstarch. Creamed soup is almost always thickened and thickened by one of these two methods.
Puree
Let’s take the cream of celery soup as an example. We can thicken this cream soup in one of two ways. Puree it after cooking or thicken it with roux or cornstarch. Pureeing the soup simply requires you to take the cooked soup and put it the blender and puree. The body of the pureed celery and whatever other vegetables are in there will thicken the soup as long as there is enough volume of vegetables to the ratio of liquid.
Note: Don't fill the blender more than hallway full when the soup is hot so it doesn’t explode!
Adding flour to thicken
Thickening the soup with flour would traditionally happen by sautéing your vegetables in butter or even in cooked bacon fat, then adding flour to the fat to make a roux. Follow the cooked roux by adding the stock and seasoning and letting the soup simmer.
It is very common to find that the soup may not be to your preferred thickness when it is done cooking. No problem, simply add additional stock or water if it is too thick or add a little more roux if it is too thin.
When I add roux at the end of cooking to correct a thin soup, I melt some butter in the microwave and simply stir in some flour and make a thin roux, 2 Tablespoons butter per 1 Tablespoon flour. This thin roux can be stirred in swiftly without causing lumps. You can also use cornstarch thinned with water and stir that in if you do not want to add more butter to your soup, about 1 Tablespoon cornstarch to 1 Tablespoon cold water.
Cheese also acts as a thickener in creamed soups, however it will not thicken a soup on its own. When you add cheese to a soup, it requires a base that has already been thickened by roux or by being pureed. The reason I even bring cheese up as a thickener is that when you want to add cheese to a soup it thickens an already thickened soup substantially more. So keep in mind that you will want a thinner soup base if you plan to add cheese.
Cheese is something that is added to soup as the second to last step of making the soup. The very last step is the addition of salt. When you add cheese to the soup, please make sure the soup is hot first, not boiling hot but at a moderate heat. Make sure the cheese is grated and stir the grated cheese in, a little at a time. Once the cheese is added, you will see that is has probably doubled the thickness of your soup. Be prepared for this when you are judging the thickness of your soup. Cheese also adds a lot of salt to your soup so I find when I make cheese soups, they generally need very little salt added to them.
I hope you have garnered some helpful tips and insights into what makes a truly exceptional creamed soup and that you feel like you can take these ideas and apply them any creamed soup recipe you might be attempting. If you appreciate this kind of deep dive into cooking theory, we have our every popular and life-changing Culinary Boot Camp. Our Fall classes are just starting to hum and holiday preparations are in the works. Brush up on your pie-making skills or order your Thanksgiving pies today!
