Imagine having a guest at home or at a restaurant, and you don’t have time to prepare a complicated dish to serve them.
You panic, fish and chicken are still in the freezer lazy sleep; leafy vegetables have fainted in the freezer because of excessive water loss; root vegetables are very excited, but you worry that they are too big to stand alone; soy products are a dark horse, but there is nothing to neutralize the smell of beans, it can only be like a hoochie with fox odor, was long hidden.
At this point, you lift the lid of a pot, eh, there is actually a pot of soup! So the world is bright again. It is a simple but not shabby choice to use it for tofu, mushrooms, or stewing dried foods, cooking seasonal vegetables, or just a handful of tender hanging noodles in it, and finally some small onions.
So you think, usually recipes often say “add a little stock or water”, it seems that water can also replace the soup, but in fact, it is completely different. With the embellishment of stock, all the ingredients have restrained their temper, rounded their angles, enriched their aura, and released their charm. Such a dish, even if simple, is enough to let guests feel your heart and sincerity, as well as the food mellow deliciousness.
Soup, is the base of cooking, is also the cook’s bag of tricks. Cooks have soup, the heart is not panic.
In the past two weeks, after hanging chicken soup, fish soup and beef consommé at school, I feel that there are still many similarities between French soup and Chinese style. Except that in addition to white stock (chicken, fish and beef stew), there is also brown stock (roasted beef bone broth). In addition, Chinese stock is usually made with only animal ingredients and does not add many vegetable ingredients for flavor, but amazingly, French stock is made with large pieces (mirepoix) of seasoned vegetables such as shallots, onions, carrots and celery to add flavor to the stock, but of course they are mercilessly discarded when the stock is finally strained. So, in the past, as a diner, I rarely saw large amounts of onions, carrots, and celery at the Western table. Even when I did see them, they didn’t feel as foreign as asparagus or artichokes. But now in the kitchen, every day and mass destruction of onions, onions, carrots, celery deal with, think these vegetables are also quite great, although rarely on the table, but are quietly contribute their fragrance of the heroes behind the scenes.
The broth is used as an ingredient in the finished soups and sauces, and can be used in a variety of combinations. One of them is broth, which includes both broth and bouillon. Clear soups include broths and consommé, while thick soups include cream soups, pureed vegetable soups, seafood soups, etc.
As a child with a Chinese stomach, in the past two weeks I have seen the good cauliflower, the good white asparagus, the good fish all disappear in the vortex of the large blender, the good little crab also in the pounding of the rolling pin in the face is now non-existent, and finally after filtering, in the role of batter (roux), cream and other things they finally become a bowl of thick soup that can not see the bottom, my Chinese stomach was My Chinese stomach was deeply shocked.
Of course, I understand that this is an inevitable cultural difference, so I am also trying to find out the reason why westerners prefer thick soup. The current idea is that one is the reason of diet structure, because the staple food of westerners is bread, loose and porous bread with thick and textured soup is a better match; second is the reason of climate, thinking of the cold, short daylight hours in Europe in winter, the feeling of clear soup immediately dissipated, only thick soup can leave some ramming dry goods in the belly, to resist the long cold; third is aesthetically speaking, western food seems to be more The pursuit of uniform texture of food, meat and vegetables loosely piled up in the soup may not be very aesthetic for them.
The most amazing experience of these two weeks was naturally making consommé. A pot of murky beef broth with seasoned vegetables, ground beef and egg whites was cooked for a while to a disgusting cosmic chaos of grey foam, and then the impurities continued to pool and the broth gradually clarified, and after 25 minutes the broth was strained and turned into a clear, clear water, and we were all dumbfounded and then saddened by what we had seen and done, etc.
Of course, there is also a similar practice in Chinese food, which is to use chicken mushrooms to absorb impurities from the chicken broth when making refined broth, and it is divided into single- and double-hanging broth according to the number of refinements. Hanging soup can be used to cook fierce ingredients such as shark’s fin and sea cucumber, and also to make small home made dishes such as boiling water cabbage.
It is excellent to have a good pot of soup to comfort one’s stomach, or mind.
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