THE NIBBLE Gourmet News & Views
Trends, Products & Items Of Note In The World Of Specialty Foods
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Archive for Soups
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March 1, 2008 at 8:44 am
· Filed under Soups, Recipes
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Need comfort? Make this soup. Frontier Soups’ Corn Chowder mix is a great food find. |
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We’re sad now that winter is turning into spring, because we won’t have an excuse to whip up a batch of one of our favorite uber-comfort foods, the luscious corn chowder from Frontier Soups. Frontier’s entire line of dry soup mixes was a NIBBLE Top Pick Of The Week last year (read the review). The $6.00 bag makes about two and a half quarts of thick, chunky soup (BYO potatoes, chicken broth and heavy cream), which makes us very happy: Depending on who is in the house, we can enjoy it for two or three days. (We straddle the line of wanting to be generous and offer it to everyone, and wanting to be covetous and keep every precious drop for ourselves.) As with many of Frontier Soup’s mixes, we couldn’t find a better recipe if we tried; most of the soups taste as good cold as they do hot. We love the corn chowder plain with some fresh dill, but you can add glamour with crumbled bacon and/or grated Monterey Jack or your favorite semisoft cheese (a mound of cheese curls on the surface of the soup makes an excellent presentation). Turn the soup into a main course by adding diced chicken breast or seafood—poached salmon, haddock or cod, crabmeat, clams or oysters (or a mix). |
| If it’s already warm where you are and a thick, creamy corn and potato chowder seems too wintry, try the spring-like Potato Leek Soup and Asparagus Almond Soup. Find more of our favorite soups in the Soups & Stocks Section of THE NIBBLE online magazine. |
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February 25, 2008 at 2:18 pm
· Filed under Soups, Daily Food Holidays
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A creamy New England clam chowder. Photo courtesy Jon Sullivan and Wikipedia. |
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We’re happy as a clam that today is National Clam Chowder Day. (Although as our colleague Philip has always asked, why is a clam so happy? It sits immobile on the ocean floor, waiting to be scooped up for someone’s dinner.) You can celebrate with New England Clam Chowder (sometimes called Boston Clam Chowder), Manhattan Clam Chowder or even Rhode Island Clam Chowder—restaurants tend to serve one or the other. New England Clam Chowder is the oldest version. According to the book 50 Chowders by Jasper White, the oldest-known printed chowder recipe is for fish chowder, printed in the Boston Evening Post on September 23, 1751. It calls for onions, pork, salt, pepper, parsley, sweet marjoram, savory, thyme and a biscuit (later replaced by oyster crackers or saltines served with the soup instead of cooked into it)—ingredients that are still used today. |
| If you wear light-colored clothing, New England may be more of your cup of soup. It’s milk- or cream-based (plus flour as a thickener), and splattering it is unlikely to permanently ruin that shirt or tie. If you want to save the calories, or cut back on cholesterol, Manhattan Clam Chowder is based on broth and tomatoes. It is actually an Italian clam soup, arriving on these shores with Italian immigrants in the late 1800s. It tends to be seasoned with oregano, from its Italian heritage. It achieved broader appeal with the name of New York Clam Chowder, which evolved to Manhattan Clam Chowder. For Rhode Island Clam Chowder, folks developed a chowder made with clear broth.
All chowders tend to be made with potatoes, onions, and of course, clams. If you have a shellfish allergy, you can opt for Fish Chowder, which substitutes shredded fish, often cod, for the clams, and throws in corn kernels for good measure. The word chowder has its roots in the Latin word calderia, which originally meant a hearth for warming things and later came to mean a cooking pot. The word evolved to cauldron, which in French became chaudiere, a heartbeat from chowder. The first chowders in our culture were fish chowders, made in cauldrons in fishing villages along the coast of France and in the Cornwall region of Southwestern England. When the fishermen came to the New World, they found clams in huge supply along the northern Atlantic coast, and clam chowder was born. Read about one of our favorite New England Clam Chowders, available by the can from Bar Harbor Foods. |
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February 4, 2008 at 5:27 pm
· Filed under Entertaining, Soups, Tip Of The Day, Daily Food Holidays
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There’s some pretty good soup to be bought “fresh” these days. Many of the stores that sell it don’t make it themselves, but buy it in bulk from companies like Hale & Hearty, Kettle Cuisine or companies that sell only to foodservice. No matter the provenance, many of these soups taste terrific, some recipes are elegant and can save you a lot of time if you’re having a dinner party. A quart of soup can feed eight people four-ounce portions (or smaller), in demitasse cups, shooters, martini glasses, Chinese tea cups or other vessels (small bowls are good, too). The idea is to provide a small taste of something good, in a stylish presentation. We go for more courses and smaller portions, mirroring today’s “small plates” trend. But those who have dined upon our eight-course dinners know that we’ve been doing this for 20 years.
- While you’re at the store picking up the soup, buy a crunchy accompaniment—gourmet breadsticks or flatbreads, pappadums, Japanese rice crackers (the black sesame ones look great with anything, and taste great, too). Look to contrast textures in every course. |
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 Ssh..don’t tell. We bought it and heated it up. |
- Pick up a garnish for the soup—fresh herbs, edible flowers, basil oil to drop in circles with a medicine dropper, crème frâiche. Look to contrast flavors and colors in every course, too.
- If your dishes and the soup aren’t colorful enough, use bright table linens. If you don’t have them, pick up some bright, solid cocktail napkins (red, yellow, whatever color works with the soup, your dishes and tablecloth) to place under atop the service plate. (As a case in point, how much better would this cream soup in a colorless dish look, if it were presented on a richly-colored cloth, napkin or service plate? Voilá—you have an impressive course that took 10 minutes to buy and 5 minutes to plate.) |
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February 4, 2008 at 4:28 pm
· Filed under Entertaining, Soups, Daily Food Holidays
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It’s soup, served in demitasse cups with garnishes from edible flowers to sliced truffles. This presentation is from Ric Tramonto, executive chef/owner of one of our favorite restaurants, Tru in Chicago.
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Today is Homemade Soup Day. But on any day, soup is a great course for family meals or entertaining because of the variety of choices and ease of serving. It can be made in advance and takes no time to plate. For an exciting soup course, serve each guest a trio or quartet of soups in demitasse cups: three different seafood soups or vegetable purées, three different ethnic soups or fruit soups, or one chicken, one beef, one pork. Whatever theme you choose, you’ll have as much fun selecting soups and garnishes and serving your guests as they’ll have consuming them. You can buy colorful, inexpensive demitasse cups at outlets and discount stores and use them for other purposes, like mini panna cottas, mousse, pots de creme and sorbet. |
- See some of our favorite soup recipes in the Soups & Stocks section of THE NIBBLE online magazine.
- Take our Soup Quiz and test your knowledge of soup. |
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January 29, 2008 at 8:32 am
· Filed under Soups, Tip Of The Day
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Make a double batch of your delicious soup and share the wealth. We didn’t even start from scratch here, but used our favorite dried soup mix from Frontier Soups (each package makes so much soup, there’s enough to share). |
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When you’re cooking your homemade soups, stews and sauces, make a double batch and give the other half as a gift. Delicious home-cooked food makes a welcome gift for birthdays, get well pick-me-ups, tired new parents, housewarmings, and is a nice touch to bring to a party for the host to enjoy the next day. If you want to make the gift even more elaborate, buy a special serving dish, ladle or set of soup bowls; or deliver the food in a handsome thermal container. See some of our favorite soups and soup recipes in the Soups & Stocks Section of THE NIBBLE online magazine. |
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December 4, 2007 at 1:30 pm
· Filed under Salts/Seasonings, The Nibble, Soups, Gifts
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Whether you’re stuffing many stockings, need teacher gifts, are playing Secret Santa or are going to lots of parties, our Stocking Stuffer gift list has something for everyone. Most of our recommended goodies cost less than $6.00, and the most expensive is $12.95. So…what can you give those good little [gourmet] boys and girls?
- Bellamessa Sea Salts in fabulous flavors
- Cabot Creamery’s Cheddar Shake For Popcorn (so good, we shake it on everything)
- Chocolate-Covered Nuts from top chocolatiers like Charles Chocolate, Coco-Luxe and Michael Recchiuti
- Das Caramelini’s Salted Caramels, a recent NIBBLE Top Pick Of The Week |
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We’d like to find lots of these in our stocking—and all the other stocking stuffers, too! |
- Frontier Soups’ Gourmet Soup Packets, another Top Pick Of The Week
- Gourmet Ketchup, an eye-opening experience
- Honeyland New Zealand’s Blue Borage Honey, a new experience, no doubt, for most honey lovers
- J&M’s Lemon Cookies, luscious little bites
- McSweet’s Cocktail Garlic and Onions—perfect for drinks, garnishes or the relish tray
- Pierre Marcolini’s Christmas Chocolate Bars
- Rich Design’s Snowflake Cookies–beautiful, delicious and handmadeSee our other gift lists in the Gift Finder section of THE NIBBLE online magazine |
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