1,535 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 78 videos

This site uses only a few technical cookies necessary for its operation. By continuing to browse, you accept their use.
To find out more...

Vegetable soups

As I write this post, we are slowly slipping into winter, and this late autumn is the perfect time for soups, especially vegetable ones. Soups, that somewhat "soft" dish, often associated with our childhood, infallible remedy against a cold evening or an ugly weather, or both.

12 K 5/5 (18 reviews)

Last modified on: December 5^th 2017

For this post: Comment Follow Ask me a question Send to a friend

Vegetable soups

What exactly is a vegetable soup? Let's just say: Water, in which vegetables are cooked long enough to mix with the water. That's the principle of course, after that it can be made in an infinite number of ways by changing the liquid (water, milk, broth, juice,...) and all the vegetables you can put in it, it's a recipe that's almost as old as humanity, and fire, and yes, pottery too.

It's very easy to make: a pan, you pour water, you add peeled vegetables, you salt a little and you cook for a long time. A small modern concession, a little shot of mixer at the end of cooking to obtain a smooth soup and hey presto, it's ready.

vegetable soup

Let's put this into practice with the leek and potato soup, one of the pillars of French home cooking:
- Leeks are washed, peeled and sliced
- Potatoes are peeled, washed and cut into small pieces
- Put everything in a large saucepan, cover with water and salt
- Cook, mix if necessary, and it's ready

Is that all? No, not quite, because it is possible to improve this method considerably by working the vegetables a little before adding the water. Let's start again:
- Wash, peel and slice leeks
- Peel, wash and chop potatoes
This is where it changes
- In the pot where the soup will be cooked, heat a little olive oil (or butter) over high heat
- Add a chopped onion and fry for 1 minute
- Add leek and potatoes to the pan, salt, pepper, and stir well, and cook for 3 or 4 minutes
- Then add the water and cook.

vegetable soup

This little change is the trick that does it all: Frying the vegetables together, with the onion and a little oil/butter, before putting in the water, will give them a taste and depth that will be much better than vegetables simply added to the future soup water. This goes for all soups, to all vegetables.

To sum up: Always fry the vegetables in a future soup for a few minutes with each other, the taste will be much better.

Lasts posts

Who's making the croissants?

When you look at a bakery from the outside, you naturally think that in the bakery, the bakers make the bread, and in the laboratory, the pastry chefs make the cakes. It's very often like that, with each of these professions having quite different ways of working, but sometimes there's also one...
November 23^th 2025610

Oven height

When we put a dish or cake in the oven, we naturally tend to put it on the middle shelf, and that's what we usually do. But in some cases, this position and height can be a little tricky, so let's find out why.
October 8^th 20252,1285

The importance of sieving

In recipes that use a fine powder (flour, powdered sugar, etc.), you'll often see the advice to sift before using it. To sift is to pass the powder in question through a sieve (a very fine strainer) before incorporating it into your recipe. It's often advice, but is it really useful?
September 3^rd 20257,1723

The grease spray

As soon as you have something in a recipe that sticks to the mold, the question always arises as to how difficult it is to remove from the mold. There's nothing more frustrating than breaking your cake when unmolding it, because part of it has stuck in the mold. The classic way to avoid this is...
August 26^th 20256,6895

Cake moulds

When we make a cake, or a cake of the same rectangular shape, we usually take out our usual mould and tell ourselves that the recipe is anyway "for a cake", but is it really that simple?
August 25^th 20256,7285

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

The secret of cooking until "done"

This is a real chef's skill: being able to look at a fish fillet cooking and say, "Stop – that's enough, it's cooked". I always admire this ability to see at a glance if something is done. It is what sets the professionals apart from us mere amateurs. And it's true that how fish is cooked is...
November 26^th 201220 K4.4

The different cooking modes

In cooking, cooking means bringing food into contact with a source of heat, to transform it: improving its taste, and sometimes its texture. This contact with the heat source can be achieved in a number of ways: these are the cooking methods, and let's take a look at the main ones.
July 24^th 20248,8144.7

Raising (or leavening) agents

When we want to make a dough or batter rise when baking, either in patisserie or bread-making, we need to use a raising agent or leavening agent, one of which is called leaven. In the context of baking, a raising agent is simply what "makes something rise". It is a substance which, when added to...
June 16^th 202157 K4.8

Children and vegetables

This is an attempt to address the question that all parents and grandparents, maybe you included, face so often: how can we get children to like vegetables? And at the same time, we might get away from the familiar, day-in, day-out round of pasta, chips, toast.. Well, I can hear you say, it's...
March 9^th 201716 K5

Double cooking of vegetables

When you cook vegetables, it's not easy to capture and preserve the flavours. It is easy to undercook, but you can make up for it, or overcook, and then it is unfortunately a bit cooked (in the sense of "ruined"). But above all, how to get the maximum of the taste of the vegetable in the pan, then...
July 12^th 201924 K4.1