Friday open thread: soup season

[dolorosa_12]

Actually, it's not really soup season ('high soup season'?), given that it was 16 degrees celcius today and the crocus bulbs are starting to bloom. However, this has been a very soup-heavy winter, and a prompt like this is about all I can manage at the moment, and thus:

What are your favourite types of soup?

My favourites are definitely the flavour- and texture-rich soups of southeast Asia: laksa, pho, and so on. I'm not such a fan of cooking them myself, however — but if they're available, I will almost always eat them.

When it comes to soups I can cook myself, I have various variants of chicken-noodle soup (Chinese, Malaysian, and Indonesian recipes) which I enjoy a lot. I also love various Turkish soups involving lentils, minestrone soup, a variety of takes on borsch, and a nostalgic, vegetable-and-legume-heavy soup that my mum used to make in industrial quantities throughout the Canberran winter when I was a child (ingredients included dried mixed legumes, potato, green beans, parsnip, carrot, leek, and barley), which I ate for lunch at school in a thermos flask, and as afternoon tea to fuel an evening of gymnastics training, and which a friend of mine with whom I used to carpool to gymnastics still raves about, because she ate so much of it at my place en route to the gym.

I could probably go on, but I think that's enough of a starting point. Talk to me about soup!

Comments

[got_quiet]

There's a restaurant near me that makes a mean Niskena soup. They serve it with some delicious fresh Kurdish bread too. I go there for lunch often.

I like pho too but it took a while for me to warm up to it. This is mostly because my first encounter with pho was in a university basement during off hours, and it was not the best introduction.

My grandma, who apparently was a terrible cook, used to make this gizzard and chicken heart soup that I used to have all the time when I went over to her house. I loved it and make it myself every winter, but it's also like... got no seasonings in it outside of some carrots and celery so I suspect if I were to feed it to anyone else they wouldn't have anything nice to say about it.

Your mom's soup sounds delicious and filling!

[dolorosa_12]

I had to look up Niskena soup, but it sounds fantastic (and reminiscent of some of the Turkish lentil soups that I've enjoyed in the past).

Your experiences with pho sound unfortunate, but I'm glad you go the chance to have a better version!

The gizzard and heart soup definitely sounds like an acquired taste, but like my mum's hearty vegetable soup, I guess if it's something you grew up with, it's comfortingly familiar.

[hamsterwoman]

My great-grandmother used to make the chicken gizzards and hearts soup as well when I was a kid (with similar amounts of seasoning). The gizzards I was merely OK with, but I loved the chicken hearts!

[got_quiet]

That's actually amazing to know! I've never met anyone outside the family who had that soup, though I haven't actually put out a survey either.

[hamsterwoman]

I'm really glad I commented then :D

My family, including the great-grandmother who made the soup, are Ashkenazi Jewish from Ukraine, in case that's relevant to soup provenance, haha.

She would also make mandlach to go in chicken soup: not the tiny squares like in the Wiki article, but a "snake" of dough cut into slices and then each slice turned into a little "boat" shape by putting a thumbprint in it, and then deep-fried. They sort of serve the same purpose as croutons or oyster crackers, but a) have a really fun, more chewy texture, and b) were very fun to stage naval battles with, as the boat shape is preserved :D

But it was usually either the gizzards/hearts OR the mandlach, not both.

[got_quiet]

Interesting! It seems to be a case of convergent evolution then. My grandma is a gentile from southern Italy so probably it's just that hearts and gizzards are naturally suited to soup. We always used to have it with ditalini pasta, but I live in a place where pasta is now relegated to the "international section" so I make do with rotini which is easier to find.

You had me at "chewy texture" with the mandlach. It sounds like the wiki version might be less chewy and more crunchy, but maybe I'll keep an eye out for them to try something new!

[hamsterwoman]

Interesting! I guess chicken hearts and gizzards are just a natural thing to make chicken soup out of / leave in there.

but I live in a place where pasta is now relegated to the "international section" so I make do with rotini which is easier to find.

Oh no!

The commercially available version of the mandlach are definitely crunchy rather than chewy, but pretty good in their own way. You may have the best luck finding them in the kosher aisle, as "soup almonds", "soup croutons", or "soup nuts", packaged like this. (It is even possible to consume them without soup. My son just sort of pours them into his mouth and chews XD)