Fall is the perfect time to experiment with making different homemade soups. Soups are an especially good food to make at home because you can easily double the recipe and store leftovers in your freezer. Just make sure to cool your soup in the fridge before freezing it. Kristen Eppich of Chatelaine offers some other helpful tips for making this classic (and good for you!) comfort food:
Sweat your vegetables: An integral element of any good recipe is accentuating the flavors. "Vegetables like onion, garlic, celery and carrots–referred to as 'aromatics'–are part of most soup recipes for this very reason, sautéed in oil or butter as a first step of flavor-making," Eppich explains. "Be sure they're cooked long enough to be softened (and release their flavor) before moving on to the next step."
Use salt minimally: Hold off on your seasoning until the end. This is because, with all of the ingredients you're using and adding along the way, you can't be certain amount how much salt is going into the recipe. Remember, stocks often contain high levels of sodium. Other staple ingredients of soups, including canned beans, vegetables and tomato paste also have large quantities of salt. Finally, always make sure to taste the soup to determine how much salt and pepper you need.
Cooling: As we said in the beginning, one of the advantages of soups is that you can store them in the freezer. Before this stage, you need to allow the soup to cool at room temperature. Let it remain uncovered for one to one and a half hours. After it has almost reached room temperature, cover the soup and refrigerate until cold. While soups can last for up to three days in the fridge, you can store them as long as two months in the freezer.
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