Cooking with Ron_Win19_Ed-final.e$S_Copy of profile_sTEFAN_fall05.qxd 11/29/19 10:05 AM Page 24
food | cooking with ron
BY RON MIKULAK | PHOTOS BY ANDY HYSLOP
Korean chicken soup
W
hen dusk starts to obscure the day at 4:30, when that cool autumn breeze turns into a face-chilling Arctic blast, when you curse yourself in the morning for forgetting your gloves as your fingers turn blue on the steering wheel, then our appetites turn towards stomach-warming, stuffy-nose-clearing, soul-comforting soups.
Aside from gazpacho — a way to eat as many in-season local tomatoes as possible — and an occasional foray into an elegant-sounding cold vegetable purée as a summer dinner party first course, cold soups have not made inroads into my culinary repertoire. But come cooler weather, I eagerly peruse cookbooks and cooking magazines seeking inspiration for chunky hot soups that provide quick, reheatable lunches or, with salad and bread, easy, satisfying dinners. A choice of three or four soups bubbling softly on the stove and a loaf or two of hearty sourdough, or crusty baguette, or even sliced Pepperidge Farm pumpernickel makes for a convivial, make-ahead dinner party. Winter soups, then, provide many levels of satisfaction and solace. Soup making is, for me, an enjoyable way to play with food. Soups usually require considerable peeling, or scraping, or chopping, or dicing vegetable ingredients, and preliminary browning or searing of meats. The soup maven has to watch and stir and watch some more as the soup comes to a boil and then must adjust the heat to the right level of simmer. Then comes occasional stirring, and tasting and adjusting of seasonings. If you have the time, tending soups for an hour or two on the stove-top is a contemplative pleasure. 24 Winter 2019 www.foodanddine.com
Stove top or pressure cooker? Both make good soups If you’re short on time but still crave the satisfaction of a hot, home-made, rib-sticking soup, use your pressure cooker or Instapot. Few pressure cooker soups take more than 30 minutes under pressure. Beforehand, there is still prep work – browning and searing, peeling, trimming, chopping – but once that lid clamps down and the pressure indicator locks everything tight, there is nothing further you can do. Pressure-cooking soup has always provided fine results for me, but I sometimes miss the watching, fussing, and checking things out that stovetop cooking invites. The soup recipes I've offered here provide a range of satisfying flavors. The baked bean soup is perhaps the fastest and easiest, and can be made in a half hour from a well stocked pantry. It is a vegan soup that has a rich umami flavor and mouth-filling texture. The Korean chicken soup, with the slow-onset and long-lasting spiciness of the gochujang chili paste (easily available now in most supermarket Asian food sections), gives welcome relief to stuffy noses and scratchy throats as well as being quite delicious even if you are healthy. The Portuguese kale and potato soup gets a milder spicy kick from the chorizo sausage, which underlays the richness and chewiness of the potatoes and kale. The goulash soup uses fresh and fermented cabbage – that would be the sauerkraut – and sweet paprika to convey its Middle European origins, and its milder taste and hunger-satisfying robustness. Soup bases make stocks almost instantly Since three of these recipes call for stocks, I will take one more opportunity to tout the value of keeping jars of the soup base Better Than