50 Simple Soups for the Slow Cooker - Lynn Alley [2]
One of the simplest ways to add flavor to a soup is to brown some or all of the ingredients before committing them to the pot. Onions can easily be chopped and added to the soup raw, but if you’d like to add an extra dimension of flavor, you can brown them in oil or butter first, anywhere from just softening them to giving them a nice golden hue. If you have a slow cooker with a cast aluminum insert suitable for use on the stovetop, then you won’t even have to use an extra pan for browning.
Better still, brown the vegetables, then cook them in the slow cooker with a little oil but no water for anywhere from 2 to 6 hours before you add the water (see French Onion Soup). This method gives the vegetables an opportunity to further brown or caramelize, adding yet more flavor to your soup.
Salt is certainly a must-have in building the flavor of any good soup. Soup is one of those foods that cries out for plenty of salt and can taste very bland without it. Salt interferes with bitter taste receptors on your tongue; then you, as a result, taste the sweet or more desirable flavors in the soup instead of its bitter elements. Salt is a flavor enhancer for everything in the soup, not just a means of adding a salty taste.
You’ll notice that I have left the matter of how much salt to add entirely to your taste; since we differ in our taste and tolerance for salt, it seems a good idea. A rule of thumb is to add about a tablespoon of salt to any one of the recipes in this book as a starting point. This is a starting point only. If the soup still tastes a little bland to you, try adding a little more salt, a little bit at a time, until you’ve reached optimum flavor. You’ll be amazed at how all the flavors in the soup jump out at you with just a little additional salt.
I use Hain Pure Foods Sea Salt from my local health food store as my all-purpose cooking salt, but I enjoy, from time to time, using specialty salts, another great way to bump up the flavor of my soup. For example, I don’t use smoked meats or fish, but I love a smoky flavor, so one of my favorite tricks is to use a good smoked salt. Specialty salt is rarely cheap, but it is one of the extravagances I allow myself from time to time because I enjoy it so much. Shop around. The last time I visited Dean & DeLuca in the Napa Valley, they had a hefty collection of specialty salts sold in bulk, including several types of smoked salt. Michael Chiarello’s NapaStyle stores and catalog also offer a number of specialty salts packed in interesting and attractive boxes.
Special ingredients such as Maggi Seasoning sauce or Bragg Liquid Aminos can be an inexpensive way to add sodium and flavor to your soups and might be considered good replacements for ingredients such as beef or chicken stock. Maggi Seasoning sauce is a dark, hydrolyzed-vegetable protein-based sauce that is very similar to soy sauce but does not contain soy. It was originally developed in the 1880s as an easy way to improve the nutritional intake of German workers. Maggi is a staple seasoning in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and it can be purchased in many shops here in the United States. Bragg Liquid Aminos was developed by Dr. Paul Bragg in the 1930s as a seasoning with nutritional value. It is a nonfermented soy product, similar to soy sauce, that breaks down the soy proteins so that they are more bioavailable to the body.
Good, thrifty Italian cooks often add the hard rinds from Parmesan cheese to soups and sauces as they cook. The rinds are just the hardened surface of the cheese, so they will either puff up and get spongy (in which case you can fish them out of the soup before serving) or they will disintegrate into the soup. Either way, they give a wonderful flavor boost to soups. I keep a small plastic bag in the freezer for storing the rinds from Parmesan cheese until I need them. And at last check, my local Whole Foods store