YOU don’t have to be a vegetarian or vegan to appreciate and enjoy a really good vegetable soup.
The cold nights we’re experiencing across Fiji is the perfect time to get into the kitchen and start trying some new vegetable soup recipes that don’t all include dhal. Don’t get me wrong, I love a well-cooked dhal vegetable soup with its buttery texture and aromatic curry leaves, but it can get boring.
Vegetable soup is such an easy meal to make because you can toss almost any vegetable in without messing it up, but if you don’t use certain flavour techniques, it can come out bland, and salt or boosters aren’t always the healthiest or best option.
So how do you turn vegetables and water into a hearty soup that is just as delicious as a bone broths?
Vegetable stock
All soups need a tasty broth base and for vegetable soups all it requires are vegetable scraps or, if you have none, a couple bags of cheap vegetables plus a few spare hours at the stove. It is also leaps and bounds has more flavour and less expensive than boxed soups from the supermarket.
When you make your own stock, its flavour will change with the seasons and no two batches will be identical. Some of my favourite things to add are ota (ferns) or moca (spinach) stems, carrot peels, onion skins and all kinds of fresh herbs like thyme or basil. Whatever you choose to use, vegetable stocks can be enjoyed on their own with noodles or a great start to a more complex soup.
Miracle spice
Paprika is the miracle spice of the Old World and made by crushing the dried pods of sweet red capsicums and one of the best ways to spice up your vegetable soup. Paprika is less hot and offers more of a deep, smoky flavour than chilli or cayenne pepper but is more palatable and won’t burn your tongue, unless you use too much. It adds a slightly spicy flavour that is absolutely wonderful.
Add a garlic clove
One little secret to spice up a vegetable soup is to add a whole clove of garlic and let it cook at least eight hours. You don’t eat the cloves, but remove it after the soup is finished. Don’t use the bottled chopped garlic as they tend to be sour from the preserving brine but a whole garlic clove adds much more flavour and as it cooks, it intensifies, so it creates a wonderful flavour profile.
Throw in some leaves
Bay leaves offer such a unique flavour to soup and stews that you’ll find them in many recipes. They are used in many different spice seasoning blends for this same reason, yet most people leave the whole leaves out when making soup at home. I always add a few bay leaves to my soups and let them simmer all day like the garlic clove. This creates such a rich, deep flavour that you will love.
Just be sure to remove them after cooking with a spoon as they are inedible.
Use a herb sachet
There’s nothing like using whole herbs in vegetable soup, and you don’t even have to chop them all and add them to the soup to eat. You can put whole springs of herbs into a hair net, or a sachet like a tea bag, which you just let sit into the soup while it cooks so the flavours can be released into the soup. Then, you just remove it and throw away the herbs when you’re done.
If you don’t have hair net or sachet, you can use any porous thin cloth like a sari or grog cloth! Just be sure to give it a good squeeze when you remove it since it might soak up some of your liquid while cooking and be sure to wash it afterwards. The best herbs to use for flavour in vegetable soup are oregano, thyme and basil.
Try chilli, pepper or
cayenne pepper powder
Like paprika, it adds such a great flavour profile and if used in little enough amounts that it won’t taste too spicy. Adding a little heat to your soup helps to round out the dish and gives it some contrast with the sweetness of the vegetables and aromatic flavours of the herbs.
Add chives or spring onions
Chives and green spring onions are part of the onion family, which means they give you a pleasant bit of spiciness when you eat them raw. You can cook chives or green spring onions, but they are better cut fresh on a bowl of soup right before you eat it. Freshly cut green onion taste great and look wonderful in soups and rather than just being a green garnish, they add to the overall flavour of the soup.
Dash of Indian spice
Curry has a really distinctive ethnic flavour that works well in some kinds of vegetable soup and is particularly heavenly in pumpkin and carrot soups, just as it works well in dhal soup.
Cumin has a distinct smoky, herb flavour that adds depth to the aromatics of a soup.
I especially love it stirred the soup as it cooks so the flavour can meld with your other ingredients. This is another spice that you really only need a small dash of because the flavour is pretty intense.
Load up some crunch
The pictures on these pages say it all, with boring-looking vegetable soup bowls turned into hearty meals with the addition of texture, the crunchy bits. Roasted pumpkin seeds or bread croutons are classic but you can also try fried chickpeas, bhuja, Chinese fried shallots or crunchy lentils. I love these additions to vegetable soups because they balance the soft cooked vegetables with just a small dose of crunch and texture.
* Next week: In our final part of this series, the ultimate noodle soups that are way better and healthier than packet instant noodles.
* Lance Seeto is culinary ambassador for Fiji Airways and the Ministry of Industry, Trade & Tourism, and television host of Taste of Paradise.