Soups and Stocks

I learned a lot about soups and stocks during the first unit. We made a chicken stock and a Thai Chicken Soup. My groups stock was fine. We put our bouquet garni, which was wrapped in cheesecloth, mirepoix, and the nourishing element, which was chicken, into the liquid, which was water, to make a chicken stock. After we let the stock simmer with the other ingredients, we removed the solid ingredients from the stock by straining the stock through a chinois. However, with our Thai Chicken Soup we did run into some problems. Our soup came out as more of a pasta dish rather than a soup. This probably occurred because our group was not really familiar with the recipe and this lead to the soup not really coming out as a soup. A way to avoid this problem next time, we could read the recipe the night before the day we would be preparing the recipe. Even though there were some problems, the end result of our efforts was a success. We also made a vegetable pureé soup. The soup was potato based and we added many vegetables to it, including carrots, onions, and broccoli. After we let the soup simmer for a while, we put a food processor in it and made a puree out of it. At the end we garnished it and it tasted very good. A problem that I think we ran into with it was that we put too many different vegetables in it. The flavor turned out to be fine, but I think it would’ve been better if we had only put 3-4 different vegetables in it.- Nick B