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Soups Trevor: Hello everyone this is Trevor Justice with the Vegetarian Health Institute. Tonight’s topic is Savory Soups. And our guest expert is Lenore Baum who is the author of Sublime Soups and Lenore’s Natural Cuisine. How you doing, Lenore? Lenore: I’m great, how are you Trevor? Trevor: Pretty good. In fact I’m starting to get hungry reading these soup recipes again. Lenore: Good. Trevor: I’m wondering if you want to kind of summarize the key points from the written lesson for people that haven’t read it yet before we go into the new student questions. Lenore: Okay. I’ll just kind of skim over it to allow time for questions and if there aren’t questions enough, I will go back and do more details. Basically, soups are my passion because it’s really my favorite food. It’s warming and nourishing and wholesome and in these economic times, very expensive. And we eat it for breakfast here in Asheville, North Carolina. And I eat it for breakfast in Phoenix, Arizona and Michigan, it’s just anywhere you live you can eat it for breakfast and have a small bowl for lunch, or a big bowl, or have it for dinner. And it’s a great travel food. You can easily put it in a thermos. And it’s extremely forgiving. Basically any ingredient in the soup recipe that you don’t like, you leave out and it should come out as long as there’s some kind of a little bit of fat in, a little bit of salt, and then the basic ingredient like beans. And if it’s too thin you can thicken it. If it’s too thick you can thin it. It makes great leftovers, and so that’s basically why my passion is soups. Trevor: Got it. Lenore: And some of the soup basics are when recipes call for vegetables to be cut up, when it’s going to be a blended soup, it kind of makes it crazy. It says mince vegetables. You don’t have to mince vegetables. Just coarsely chop them. It’s going in the blender anyway, and it makes a really fast preparation that way. So let’s see. One thing that would add complexity and Page 1 of 31 Soups depth to food is sautéing. It’s not necessary, and if you’re running out of time you can just eliminate that step, but sautéing like onions and garlic before it’s put into the soup really adds a delicious depth to it. Trevor: So yeah, I have a question about that one Lenore. In our program we try to encourage people to get their fats from whole foods like avocados, nuts, and seeds to minimize oil. So, how important is it from a taste standpoint or – I shouldn’t say important, but how dramatic is the difference in taste when you sauté the vegetables first versus not? Lenore: First of all, I only use about half a teaspoon of coconut oil. So it’s such a little amount. It caramelizes for instance onions, so it really gives it that sort of umami flavor. It really gives the extra depth. It’s not critical, but I just made some soup today, gingered squash soup. And I didn’t sauté it. I just decided not to do it and see the difference, and there really was a noticeable difference. I mean soup is soup, I love soup any way it made, but if you want something that’s got more flavor, then you sauté. Trevor: So half a teaspoon, so little. Do you use like an extra small skillet or how do you make it – ? Lenore: I use these pans that are Diamond. They’re nonstick but they’re embedded with little diamond particles. It takes very little oil. It’s just enough to allow it to make more heat between the vegetables like the onions, and the pan and it browns it. Trevor: So the typical nonstick pans I don’t use, because I’m always afraid some of the little nonstick stuff will come off in the food. What is this type of pot that you’re describing? Lenore: There’s Scanpan and Swiss Diamond. They are nonstick, but they’re embedded with very hard material. One of them has diamond particles and the other one has ceramic titanium particles. So it hardens. It’s a slurry that is mixed in with the nonstick so that it’s very, very hard. I had a metallics person, somebody with a degree and PhD in metallurgy, evaluate them for me. And he felt that they were okay. I don’t use any utensils that would scratch it or Page 2 of 31 Soups anything like that. I use wooden – you know, and they’re very easy to clean up. I know it’s not the ideal. Ideally it would be cast iron, but they’re awfully heavy and hard to take care of. [Crosstalk] Pardon? Trevor: If someone was using cast iron to sauté, could they get away with half a teaspoon of olive oil? Lenore: No, no they’d probably have to use two or three times that, but still that’s not that much. And coconut oil’s a good quality oil. It’s got a good high flash point, so it doesn’t degenerate. It doesn’t deteriorate the way like olive oil. For years I used olive oil thinking that was the right oil, but of course it isn’t for heating up, because it will – it just breaks apart. It’s got a low flash point. Trevor: Are you using flash point to mean the same thing as the smoking point? Lenore: Yeah, the smoking point, I call it the flash point. Yes, exactly. Trevor: So I just want to point everyone listening to lesson number, just a sec here, lesson number 23 where Vesanto Melina talks about the best oils for raw versus cooked. And there’s a smoke point table in there. So, if anyone’s curious, I’ll tell you right now what it says. Let’s see here, olive oil has – is this right? This is pretty high. It says that extra virgin, the smoke point is 375° and the one that’s not extra virgin, the smoke point is 420°. That sounds pretty high. Lenore: What is coconut oil? Trevor: Yeah, I’m sure it’s higher – interesting, I thought it’d be higher. It says here that refined coconut oil could be heated up to 450 as opposed to 420 or 375 for olives. So it’s little higher. Not as big of a gap as I thought. Lenore: Not as big as I remembered either. Well, I like coconut oil. And I often use, let’s see what is it, expeller pressed, expeller pressed coconut oil doesn’t have any coconut flavor to Page 3 of 31 Soups it. So, if I’m not cooking with something that I want, if I don’t want a coconut flavor I’ll use expeller pressed. If I want coconut flavor, then I will use regular coconut oil, virgin. Trevor: Got it. Lenore: So, I’ll go back to talking some more about some basics. One of my favorite things is pressure cooking, and I know a lot of people have fear of pressure cooking, because they heard stories from their mothers and grandmothers about pea soup on the ceiling and things like that, but the new generation pressure cooker isn’t like that. There are three safety features on it and it’s very unlikely unless you walk away and have it turned on high for 20 minutes, and then it might sprat onto the side but not up to the ceiling. But pressure cooking in like 12 minutes you can cook a bean soup, which would normally take an hour to simmer on the stove. So not only does it save time, but it really saves resources on the planet, because you’re not using fuel for that long. And it marries the flavors, you know its there under 15 lbs per square inch, and all that pressure is mingling, comingling the flavors. And it’s just a wonderful way to especially make bean soups. Trevor: Yep, actually I think you know we had a whole lesson on pressure cooking, lesson 43, and Jill Nussinow was our guest expert. Lenore: Yes. Well I concur. Trevor: Do you also have videos or anything specifically on pressure cooking? Lenore: We’re actually in the process of putting some videos together, I don’t at this point, but my husband has been filming a lot of my classes and he’s going to edit them and we’re going to put them on the website and make them available. Trevor: Great. Lenore: Yeah. Page 4 of 31 Soups Trevor: Well, keep going. Lenore: Okay. Let’s see. Any soup would be actually more delicious and create a rich velvety texture without adding fat if you blended like three or four cups of it. So you take three or four cups of the soup after it’s cooked, put it in the blender, and then pour it back into the soup pot. And then it becomes like a rich base. This is particularly true with bean soup or even vegetable soups. Trevor: Now I read about you using an immersion blender, which is sort of like a handheld, is that how you normally do it? Lenore: Well, no.