sweeter ones. Second, enzymatic reactions that create simple
sugars are accelerated with heat.
Step 2: Choose Your Aromatics
Alliums—onions, leeks, shallots, garlic, and the like—are
like the Best Supporting Actor of the soup pot. They’re not
there to steal the spotlight, but without them, your soup
would be boring. Nearly every soup I make starts with either
onions or leeks, along with some garlic or shallot (and
sometimes all four!) cooked down in olive oil or butter.
Other firm vegetables such as diced carrots, bell peppers,
celery, thinly sliced fennel, or ginger can work well in
certain situations, but they tend to have a stronger impact on
the finished flavor of the dish, so make sure that you really
want them there. Make a carrot soup with just onions and
it’ll taste like carrot soup. Make a carrot soup with fennel or
ginger, and it will taste like carrot-and-fennel soup or carrot-
and-ginger soup.
Step 3: Sweat or Brown Your Aromatics
Next big question: to sweat or to brown?
- Sweating is the process of slowly cooking chopped
vegetables in a fat. You do it over moderate heat, and the
goal is to get rid of some of the excess moisture within
those vegetables, and to break down their cellular
structure so that their flavor is released. With the case of
alliums, there’s another process going on: onion aroma is
created when certain precursor molecules that exist within
separate compartments in onion cells break out and