It’s hard to beat a simple pasta fagioli. Just cannellini beans, ditalini pasta, and a good stock. The trick is to take about a quarter of the beans and mash or puree them into the stock so it gets a creamy texture. Some people add tomato sauce but I prefer it without.
If stews are allowed, this is the perfect season for a hearty beef stew with a lot of potatos, carrots, and onion and cooked with a bit of wine or beer.
If we are going by a stricter definition of soup, then maybe a spicy seafood soup with a lot cilantro and lime.
Did see someone mention chicken tortilla and pasta fagioli which reminded me it’s been too long since I’ve made either of those, but I haven’t seen anyone recommend my personal fav, beef barley!
If anyone’s got a good pozole recipe, I’d love to check that out also!
I like vegetable soup as a way to use up any veg that’s about to go out of date. Fresh vegetable stock, roasting some veg beforehand, and adding a hint of curry powder helps make a lovely blended soup.
Funnel chanterelle soup is my all-time favorite. Funnel chanterelles are pretty easy to forage where I live, so I always have a bunch of them in the freezer. It’s a cream-based soup with blue cheese in it, an absolute blast of a meal.
Not a recipe, but I love putting some parmesan rind on my stock, it completes the flavor a bit. I just keep a jar with the rinds in the freezer for this purpose.
And if you’re lactose intolerant, cheeses aged 12 months or more have no more lactose anymore
There’s a soup season? I eat soup practically everyday.
Anyway, my favorites are: Caldo Verde and Sopa de Feijão. As I’m sure most people don’t know them heres a short description:
Caldo Verde
Lots and lots of finelly cut dark green cabbage on a smooth purée base of potatoes and onion. Traditional version also takes several slidces of blood sausage (chouriço).
Sopa de Feijão (Bean Soul)
Chopped up cabbage and carrots on a smooth base of beans and onion. Beans are usualy brown or butter beans bought dry, soaked overnight and then cooked.
Yeah, Alton Brown taught me so much about cooking. I find that I learn so much more getting into the science of things. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is one of my favorites, especially when he was doing Food Lab. But he still explains a lot about why ingredients react the way they do and what makes good combinations.
But if you read the article you’d have seen that prewashing to remove starch makes no difference. That’s literally the point of this article.
“Culinary experts claim pre-washing rice reduces the amount of starch coming from the rice grains. … Contrary to what chefs will tell you, this study showed the washing process had no effect on the stickiness (or hardness) of the rice.”
And traditionally it was washed for cleanliness. The new wash to remove starch is a modern concept some people clearly started to say to sound smart with no evidence or science and it took off. Read the article
Prefacing this with this is my anecdotal experience, while the results are the same I find it much easier to clean up if I prewash the rice first. I don’t bother presoaking most of the time although some recipes call for it. I pretty much only have basmati and jasmine rice on hand so maybe it also depends on the variety?
This was the question in the article. They did a test of unwashed, washed 3 times, and washed 10 times, then compared the rice. The scientists found no difference between the samples. They further speculate that the stickyness level of the rice has to do with the starches that leech from inside the rice.
The article goes on to talk about how, depending on how (and where) the rice is processed, you may want to rinse rice to remove bits of husk, dust, pebbles, and possibly arsenic or microplastics.
Now, having said all of that, take the results of the study with a grain of salt. Washing 3 times isn’t going to do much of anything, and 10 times doesn’t actually tell us that they washed the rice properly. As soon as the starch is wet, it’s sticky. You really have to rinse and agitate the rice, and wash until the water runs clear. Maybe that also leeches some of the more available starch from inside the rice, but the difference is noticeable to anyone who cooks rice on a regular basis. So I’m not going to question the suggested mechanism of action, but I know how to make rice that is and isn’t sticky.
Im glad they mentioned the debris. My mom always told me they (family when they were in Vietnam) used to wash rice because of the pebbles, dust and bugs that may get into it. The water makes the bugs move which made it easier to pick out. She does it now because of the dust or whatever that may be on it. Never heard of the starch thing until watching youtube videos.
Still going to wash my rice though. Its better this way.
This is the reason I wash rice. Empty hulls, dirt, and bugs naturally float so it’s easier to take them out. We use brown or red rice so it’s not as “clean” as polished white rice. Also, even if the study says washing doesn’t do anything, the fact that the water turns a different color when rinsing shows that something gets removed when washing.
Yeah, the study said it has no effect on the stickiness of the rice.
Which is bizarre, because I’ve…seen it. Like repeatedly. And it’s not a subtle difference. When I am lazy and don’t wash my rice, it comes out MUCH gooier. It’s not terrible but it’s significantly different than when I wash it well.
Is this going to make me buy a second rice cooker to compare side by side? Ugh.
The popular press report says that washing doesn’t make a difference. The actual, paywalled study says they did find a highly significant interaction between washing and type of rice, which is a level of statistical sophistication that a food writer might not grasp. In fact, even the scientific authors seem not to have commented much on the interaction.
In their data, it looks like washing 0-amylose glutinous rice makes it more sticky, while washing medium-grain 21% amylose rice even just 3 times makes it less sticky, and that 13% amylose Jasmine rice is just kind of all over the place or not systematically influenced by washing. They didn’t do a big table of adjusted post hocs, so it’s difficult to tell which specific groups are different from which others.
They also cooked the rices differently, using 1:1.3 rice:water for the glutinous and 1:1.6 for the medium and Jasmine, which obviously might confound their observations.
I've seen it, too. When I want fluffy individual grains, I rinse the rice first. If I want sticky rice, I don't rinse it. And it works for all different kinds of rice.
There's going to be powdered starch on the outside of the grains of rice. If you rinsed it and then added something like corn starch to the water you'd end up with sticky rice.
Only if you're concerned about removing dust, insects, little stones, bits of husk left from the rice hulling process, arsenic, and 20-40% of microplastics. The amount of those things is influenced by the region in which it's produced. Stickiness reduction from washing is nominal due to there being two different types of starch. The kind on the surface is different than the variety inside the grain, which is what affects the stickiness.
I've never bothered rinsing, but probably will now because of microplastics and arsenic. I've never seen impurities like what are listed, but I only buy rice produced in California.
If you think summer is too hot for soup, you’ve never had a good Pho or Tom Yum Goong. Perfect soup for all weather.
It’s becoming summer in the southern hemisphere, and we’re not stopping the soup. We’ll have more Gazpacho and chilled borscht but we’re still souping it up down here.
Interesting. Though anybody literate in the scientific method knows that one study doesn't mean much. Whether it's placebo or not, I notice a difference in the finished product when I wash rice, so I will continue to do so.
Me too. There is always rice sludge on the lid of the rice cooker and dribbled down the sides if I don’t do at least one rinse. Definitely better texture too.
The washing away of some(…) microplastics and arsenic sounds nice, and I’m not concerned over the loss of whatever trace minerals white rice would even have.
White rice in the US is enriched with various vitamins, in a sad attempt to replace the nutrition stripped from milling away the outer part and bran. Better to just eat brown rice, though it also has more arsenic. Ah, isn’t modern food lovely.
The article does seem to accurately portray the findings of the peer reviewed research that it links to. Not saying that it’s infallible, but probably worth considering.
I believe the article, in the very narrow thing it actually claims, which is that the starches that come off of rice in washing don’t matter much in how sticky the rice is. That’s mostly down to what kind of rice you’re using. Short grain is stickier, longer grains are not.
I’m still 100% going to wash my rice because I don’t want to deal with the cleanup on that extra starch, it gets everywhere. And while I haven’t had bugs in my rice for a while, it happens sometimes.
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