Learning Lessons the Hard Way

Soups! As a part of the soup unit for culinary I have learned a lot about the do’s and don’ts to cooking. Stock- while making the stock I had to figure out the hard way that yes, cutting up chicken was definitely going to make me woozy. But all in all, the stock was pretty easy. The only thing I really had issues with was the simmering, and how hot the burner was. I could not tell if it was too high of a flame or not. But speaking about simmering, some of the recipes we were making involved some simmering and I came to the same problem that I ran into while making the stock. I thought I was going to reduce the liquids too much. A very important part of the stock and soups was the nourishing element. As pivotal as the nourishing element is to health it is also well needed when it comes to the color of the soup and it looking appealing. One of our soups, Cheeseburger soup, smelled very good and tasted amazing, but it had a funky look to it. Knowing what I know now I probably would have added more herbs to add color and make it look less like a cheese sauce. A close relative you could say to nourishing elements is the mirepoix, it basically has the same motivation and end result. Again, we did not execute either the nourishing element or the mirepoix very well. But, on the topic of our Cheese burger soup, we pureed the soup to make sure all the vegetables were smaller than a dice but not knowing that we were going to puree it, we took a lot of time making our dicing of the potatoes and other vegetables look uniform. We could have spent more time making sure the recipe was followed correctly and quickly. One of the students in my group also put cilantro on top of his soup after it was over, which was a very nice garnish to add making it just a little more attractive. A very necessary element to all of the recipes we were given is the sweating of vegetables. This is important because the greens would never release that moisture and would end up not soaking in the soup. This was a mistake I had made while making our potato based soup, I did not let the potatoes release any of their moisture and they didn’t absorb any of the flavor from the soup. In order to strain the stocks of their liquids and just keep the chicken and the fat, we should have used a chinois, but we didn’t strain the stock of the chicken or fats. We should have due to the fact that there was a lot of fat in our stock which made it kind of unappealing. And just like the chinois, we didn’t use the cheese cloth either. Learning from this, I know we should the next time.