What and when to salt? How to cook delicious soup When to put salt in soup

How much salt should I put in 3 liters of soup? This question worries many novice cooks. In order to prevent cases of under-salting and over-salting, we suggest that you read this article and gain useful information for yourself.

I would like to immediately answer the question stated in the topic of the article. If salty foods were not added to the soup, such as sauerkraut, pickles, smoked meat, sausages, processed cheese, smoked fish and other products with salt, then the norm for 3 liters of soup will be 3 level teaspoons. This is approximately 23 grams.

The amount of this spice that is added to one or another type of first course is shown in the table below.

Required amount of salt in grams per liter of soup

All data in the table is for first courses made from unsalted foods. When preparing solyanka, cheese, pickle, the values ​​are reduced by 1.5-2 times.

Name	Water volume, l
	1	2	3	4	5
Meat or fish	6-10	12-20	18-30	24-40	30-50
Lactic	6	12	18	24	30
Cream soup	6-10	12-20	18-30	24-40	30-50
Cold	6	12	18	24	30
Soup sauce	10	20	30	40	50

Tip: if you salt the first dish at the end of cooking, the risk of oversalting is reduced. Add gradually, periodically tasting the broth.

Lack of salt can lead to souring. Read the article about other reasons for quick spoilage of first courses!

Daily salt intake for humans

Everything is needed in moderation. It’s better not to joke with this ingredient, because... the line between benefit and harm is thin.

According to the WHO - World Health Organization, it is recommended that adults consume no more than 5 grams of salt per day.

Norms for a child depending on age:

• 0-9 months - not added to food
• from 9 months to 3 years - it is recommended to consume up to 2 grams per day
• from 3 to 7 years - no more than 3 grams per day
• from 7 years - no more than 5 grams per day

Excess salty foods are harmful to the body and provoke various diseases of the kidneys and cardiovascular system.

However, so is the disadvantage. Deficiency leads to digestive system disorders, depression, anorexia, psychological and cardiovascular diseases.

Eat right and be healthy!

To make the broth rich, the meat should be filled with cold water. The broth is quickly brought to a boil and then simmered over low heat.
If you cook the broth over high heat, the meat will be tastier and the broth will not be as rich.
When cooking soup, after each addition of vegetables, quickly bring the soup to a boil and then reduce the heat.
Stir soups using slow circular movements. Only in this case the integrity of the vegetables in the soup is not compromised.
Do not add water to the broth; it greatly affects the taste of the broth. If it is necessary to add (too much salt or too little liquid), then use boiling water.
To prevent the soup or broth from losing its beautiful transparent color, always remove the bay leaf from the soup after cooking.
Any soup will be much tastier if, after cooking the soup, you let it brew for a little while.
Heat the broth over low heat, uncovered. This way it will better retain its transparency and taste.

When to salt soup

Salt the meat broth twenty minutes before the end of cooking.
Salt the fish broth at the beginning of cooking.
Salt mushroom soups at the very end of cooking.

How to cook delicious soup

The most delicious mushroom soup is made from porcini mushrooms, champignons or morels.
To make mushroom soup tasty and rich, it is better to use both large dried mushrooms and small ones. Large mushrooms give the broth a dark color and delicate taste, and small ones give it an aroma.
The borscht will be richer if you cook it from brisket.
A few minutes before the end of cooking, be sure to add chopped lettuce peppers to the borscht. Pepper adds vitamins to the dish and gives it a special taste.
The main ingredients of any pickle are pickled or canned cucumbers, cucumber pickle and sautéed vegetables. The remaining ingredients can be very different, depending on the name of the recipe and the chef’s idea.
If pearl barley is sautéed in oil rather than boiled, the pickle will turn out much tastier.
If the pickle is not spicy enough, add boiled cucumber pickle (pre-strained) to it.
To make pearl barley soup a beautiful color, first fry the pearl barley in butter.
If you add a tablespoon of sherry to the soup, the soup will turn out much tastier.
To make soup with noodles or noodles clear, first immerse the noodles in boiling water for a few seconds to wash off excess flour. And only after that they put the noodles into the soup or broth and cook until done.
If we cook fish soup, then put the fish in cold water and cook.
To give the soup a piquant taste, add half a fresh apple to it.
To make the broth a beautiful yellow-orange color, add a little fresh onion broth to it (cook the peel of one onion for 10 minutes in a small amount of liquid).
Puree soups can be prepared from one type of vegetable, or they can be cooked from several types of vegetables. In order not to “kill” the vegetable aroma of the soup, we add a minimum of spices.
As a rule, croutons are served with puree soup. The croutons will turn out much tastier if you sprinkle them with grated Dutch cheese before drying.
Cook any milk soups over low heat so that the milk does not burn. In this case, it is advisable to use a pan with a thick bottom.
When preparing milk soup with noodles, do not forget that all pasta cooks very poorly in milk. Therefore, we first boil vermicelli or noodles until half cooked in water, and only then finish cooking them in milk.
We first blanch white cabbage, Brussels sprouts or savoy cabbage for milk soup, and then cook it.

But why did we start our presentation of cooking techniques with porridges, and not, say, with soup? After all, it seems to be less difficult to cook; besides, soup is the first course, and porridge is the second course. Wouldn't it be more logical to start the story with soup? Isn't it more difficult to prepare porridge?

No. No more difficult. In culinary terms it is much simpler. And it was not by chance that we started talking about porridge as the first step in cooking.

It’s just that cooking itself is a complex and varied process. That is why the amount of culinary specificity here immediately increases. But porridges are simple compared to soups. After all, when preparing porridge, we must focus all our attention on one thing: obtaining boiled grain in good condition.

We don’t think about the water or milk in which this grain, this porridge is cooked. In this case, they are only an auxiliary means, a medium that helps the preparation, but by the end of it disappears completely.

Therefore, during the cooking process, we should not worry about the taste of this component, the taste of the liquid.

With soup, the situation is completely different: there we are talking about the tasty preparation of the medium, the liquid, and about preserving the taste of the solid part of the soup - meat, fish, noodles, vegetables, mushrooms, grains and other components that are different from each other, and sometimes they are opposite in their physical and biochemical data, requiring different attitudes and multilateral attention. This alone puts soup making at a higher level.

Everyone knows the dislike of soup grounds, which is more often observed in children, but also found in adults - the whole thing or any of its individual components: onions, carrots, parsley and, less often, beets and cabbage. And there are people who eat the grounds but leave the soup liquid, although these are much less common.

What's the matter?

We have already mentioned above that when food is placed (during cooking) in cold water, partial and sometimes complete digestion of all nutrients from the food occurs into the solution, into the liquid part of the soup. Therefore, even if cooked incorrectly, this part becomes tastier and richer than completely emaciated, boiled, devoid of nutrients meat, fish, vegetables, and grain.

Due to the fact that different products have different structures and therefore their boiling, melting and readiness temperatures are different, it turns out that in the general thickness of the soup some products (such as onions) manage to completely deteriorate, while others still retain some of their previous qualities and taste. At the same time, the taste of the entire liquid part becomes better and better.

That is why children, and even adults, refuse onions or carrots in soup, but eat slurry, meat or fish.

Well, let's not find fault with them too much, but try to extract useful guidance for ourselves from their reaction. We will prepare soups more carefully, more correctly, and, therefore, better.

What does it mean to cook soup correctly?

To answer this question, you will have to talk about soups in more detail. Let's start with the fact that soups arose relatively late. Several million years ago, people did not know what soup was. At that time he ate mainly fruits, berries, vegetables, and nuts. Later, meat and fish invaded life, and fire appeared.

Several millennia passed without soup, but with baked solid foods in addition to raw plant foods. And in the end the man could not stand it and began to look for an opportunity to cook. The invention of pottery meant as great a revolution in cooking as the discovery of fire.

Where there was no pottery, man created stone ones. This ancient utensil is still considered the best for making soups and is unlikely to be surpassed. But it was known to a small number of peoples and for a relatively short time.

The real flourishing of soups began only 100 years BC in the East, in China and neighboring Asian countries, and in Europe even later: in Southern Europe from the 15th-16th centuries, after the invention of earthenware and acquaintance with Chinese and Japanese porcelain and after creating glazed, enameled dishes. But even this dating gives only an approximate idea of ​​when real soups appeared. Their wider distribution among the people dates back to an even later time - to the 17th-18th centuries.

Of course, even in ancient times, before the invention of pottery, people knew how to cook and boil water and along with it other food products in hollow wooden, bamboo and other vessels, lowering stones heated over a fire into them. But what kind of soup was this? Even ancient, primitive people did not eat it, but caught and ate valuable boiled grounds - meat, fish, whole vegetables.

Real soup could only arise after non-oxidizing, strong and chemically pure utensils appeared, and people learned to cut up food products, select the most suitable parts from them, cut them, and understand the nature of cutting and its effect on taste. This was only approached 400-500 years ago. This means that soup as a dish is young.

In addition, soup is a sedentary person's dish. And he remains so to this day. Only in a strong, permanent family do they eat soup regularly. The lack of soup in the house is one of the first indicators and signs of family trouble.

That's why not everyone can make soup. It can be done by a person who is not only knowledgeable, or rather, knowledgeable, but also calm, balanced, confident, stable in his disposition, in his psyche, and at the same time not devoid of a creative streak, culinary and general talent. It turns out how many qualities you need to have, what complex of them you need to possess in order to prepare a “simple soup”. “Isn’t that a lot of honor?” - another reader will ask.

No. A little. “Simple soup” is not a simple matter at all. Or rather, if the soup turns out simple, then it is not a soup, it is better not to make it.

Soup must be prepared so that this dish brings health and celebration every time, every day, so that it is desired, so that it is eagerly awaited, so that it is served not haphazardly, but, as befits an important dish, solemnly.

It is no coincidence that a porcelain bowl was invented to serve soup in the East - a “ho-go” samovar, and in Europe a tureen was a large oval porcelain pan with a lid, which we can now only see in sets. It was in this dish that hot soup was served directly on the table, so that in the presence of all family members, the owner or hostess would ceremoniously pour it into plates - steaming and tantalizing with its aroma.

This tradition contained not only respect for the family, but also respect for the hard work of the housewife, for her main culinary work of the day - for soup, without which, as everyone understood, there would be neither work nor joy.

That is why in canteens and restaurants soup must be prepared by a cook of a higher class than a cook.

A cook can be compared to a paramedic, a chiropractor, who sometimes has more life experience than a doctor, and knows in detail one operation, which even a doctor cannot always perform as quickly and painlessly, because he has not been trained in it every day for many years. But the paramedic does not see the essence of the disease, does not know how to make a diagnosis, and cannot accurately determine what is important in the patient’s complaints. This requires higher knowledge; for this, experience alone is not enough, but an understanding of the principles of medicine is needed.

Same with soup. To cook it (not just one type, but any of the soups), you need to be a cook - have a higher culinary education, be a kind of “doctor” in the field of cooking.

It turns out, no matter how we approach this issue, soups are a higher stage compared to cooking porridge, and therefore we move on to them after long psychological preparation, which, although not completely, still replaces experience.

Cooking soups

Of course, we are talking about real, tasty, high-quality soups, and not about what is popularly called gruel. Soups are very easily relegated to the level of primitive and tasteless dishes if they are prepared without sufficient qualifications and, most importantly, without understanding their specific properties. It has been noticed that not all cooks succeed in making delicious soups and that for many it is much more difficult to prepare them than any complex main course.

Therefore, in most cases, soups are prepared carelessly - why bother when a good result is still not easy to achieve: quite often in the dining room and at home, soups become the most tasteless, unappetizing dishes.

They are eaten because “you can’t live without soup”, “you need something hot”, “lunch is more satisfying with soup”, “you definitely need soup in winter”, and for other similar reasons that are very far from the assessment of taste. And so we got used to it that at our banquets, evenings, dinner parties, name days, birthdays and other special occasions there are usually no soups. They are not served as “too simple” dishes, but are offered either only appetizers, or appetizers and hot, so-called “main courses”.

Meanwhile, soup prepared according to all the rules and with a high degree of skill is a decoration of the table, truly the first dish in its taste.

But making a good soup is a great art that requires special attention and time.

The main thing is that high quality is more difficult to achieve in soups than in all other dishes, due to a number of circumstances.

Briefly about the circumstances:

First. Soups turn out better the smaller they are cooked in. It is best to prepare soup for no more than 6 - 10 servings at a time, that is, in a saucepan (or cauldron) with a maximum capacity of 10 liters.
This means that homemade soup, cooked for 3 to 5 people, is preferable to anything else.

Second. Dishes for soups must be clay (faience, porcelain), stone or enameled, but in no case metal without any coating.
Soups are especially tasty in stone dishes, which are still used in some places in the Caucasus to this day. Thus, not only the material and coating, the protection of the inner surface of the cookware matters, but also its thickness, and hence its heat capacity and thermal conductivity.
The slower and calmer the soup simmers, the tastier it is. It’s even better when it doesn’t boil, but simmers.

Third. The ratio of water and other products in soups must be precisely balanced. By the end of cooking, the amount of liquid per serving should not exceed 350-400 cubic centimeters or milliliters.
The minimum liquid is 200-250 milliliters per serving. At the same time, during cooking you should neither pour out nor add liquid - both of them significantly worsen the taste. But this very condition is almost never met either in public catering or in the household.
It is necessary to correctly measure the amount of water and other products in the soup before cooking, taking into account how much water will boil away during the cooking process.

As you can see, the three main preconditions do not relate to the art of cooking itself, but are related, so to speak, to the technical conditions of cooking: time, utensils, fire, water and volume. In everyday life, they are often neglected, especially since in cookbooks they are not mentioned at all or are spoken of in such patter that they go unnoticed.

In addition, there are several more purely culinary rules that also need to be taken into account.

Here are the six rules, the six commandments in order:

First. Soups require high freshness of all products and their careful processing, removing all defects by cleaning, trimming, and scraping. Products for soup should be washed not only from external dirt, but also from foreign odors, which not everyone knows how or wants to do.
The cutting must be carried out so thoroughly that each piece of meat, fish, and vegetables put in the soup must first be completely cleaned, washed and dried, only then all the components are filled with water.

Second. When cutting food, the cutting form characteristic of a given soup must be strictly observed, because it affects its taste. This means that in one type of soup you need to put, say, a whole onion, and in another you need to chop it; carrots should be placed whole in one soup, in cubes in another, in strips in a third, etc., etc.
These are not external embellishment, decorative differences, but requirements dictated by the taste and purpose of the dish (soup).

Third. Adding ingredients to the soup should be done in a certain order, so that none of the components are overcooked and so that the entire soup does not boil for too long, but ripens just when all its components are cooked.
To do this, the cook must know and remember the cooking time of each product, each component.

Fourth. You should always salt the soup at the end of cooking, but not too late, at the moment when the main products in it have just been cooked, but have not yet been overcooked, have not been overcooked, and are able to absorb salt evenly.
If the soup is salted too early, when the food is still hard, then it takes longer to cook and is oversalted, since the salt mainly remains in the liquid, and if the soup is salted too late, it becomes both salty (liquid) and tasteless (thick).

Fifth. When cooking soup, you must constantly monitor it, do not let it boil over, try often, correcting mistakes in time, monitoring the change in the taste of the broth, the consistency of meat, fish, and vegetables. That is why soup is considered an inconvenient dish for cooks, because it does not let you go for a minute.
In home and restaurant practice, this is often neglected, leaving the soup to the mercy of fate.
A good cook does not take time into account when preparing soup, knowing that these “losses” will more than pay off in excellent quality.

Sixth. The most crucial moment comes after the soup is mostly cooked, salted and literally a few minutes remain - from 3 to 7 - until it is completely ready. During this time, it is necessary, as practical chefs say, to “bring the soup to taste” - to give it aroma, smell, piquancy, depending on its type and the requirements of the recipe, as well as on the individual skill of the cook, on his personal taste and desire.
Usually, it is this final operation that few succeed, and it is at this stage that the soup can be seriously spoiled. Meanwhile, a cook with a delicate taste at this final moment, adding a variety of seasonings and spices, is able to turn a seemingly ordinary soup dish into a masterpiece.

Finally, the soup is ready, removed from the stove, but even after that, a real cook is in no hurry to serve it on the table. He will definitely pour it quickly into the tureen (or “put” the solid part separately and fill it with liquid), let it stand under the lid for 7 to 20 minutes, so that the soup infuses, so that the spices and salt evenly penetrate into the meat or other components, so that the liquid part of the soup was not watery, but would have acquired a pleasant thick, velvety consistency (it is when the soup is poured into the tureen that the liquid thickens and mixes).

This soup has a pronounced aroma, tenderness, softness, the right temperature and is therefore well perceived by the organs of touch, smell and digestion. Many soups continue to “ripen” even after being poured into plates (in no case should this be done with metal, but with enameled, porcelain or wooden ladles).

Now all that remains is to put in them dill, celery, parsley, sour cream, lemon, a solution of fruit lewives, and sometimes croutons, flakes, poached eggs - and the soup has finally acquired flavor completeness and integrity.

And one more property, one feature, soups have. A feature that turns them into privileged dishes. It is not recommended to reheat soups. They are best eaten immediately after cooking. Even very well-cooked soups lose flavor after reheating.

Only one type of soup - daily cabbage soup (lean, mushroom broth with sauerkraut) - improves its taste after a day (no more!), of course, with proper storage: in glass, enamel or clay, that is, non-oxidizing containers. This makes it clear why people don’t like to prepare soups for banquets: they cannot, like appetizers, be prepared a day in advance and put in the refrigerator.

Already from this very cursory enumeration of the basic rules for preparing soups and their properties, it is clear how complex, and most importantly, labor-intensive and capricious the soup is, and how much we usually miss by preparing it somehow, hastily, not according to the rules.

Of course, each specific soup has many more little cooking secrets that are easy for an attentive, observant person who has mastered the above basic rules.

In world culinary practice, one and a half hundred types of soups are known, which are divided into more than 1000 types, and each type also has several subtypes or variants. So, for example, there are 24 options for cabbage soup, 18 for soup, 22 for borscht. But, of course, only the types of soups differ sharply from each other. Of the 150 world types, only the peoples of Russia and the Near Abroad have approximately 90.

There are several hundred types and variants of soups. They are often mistakenly considered different soups. For example, potato soup, dumpling soup or noodle soup. In fact, these are not different soups at all, but completely identical or one type. And they are prepared according to the same technological rule and have the same set of components in their culinary essence.

Of all the variety, of the true kaleidoscope of soups, we use at most two or three types, or even one, in catering and at home, using only its different variants. This, of course, is irrational. That is why the development of new types and types of soups and their widespread introduction into both public and home nutrition is our common task that affects everyone.

And now some purely practical advice.

When is the best time to eat soup?

Of course, during the day, ideally at 13:00.
It is irrational to eat soup early in the morning. It overloads the stomach of a person who has rested from sleep and reduces performance during the best, “lightest” productive hours of the day.
In the evening, at dinner, soup should also not be eaten - it weighs down the stomach, causes rapid sleep, but at the same time speeds up the digestion process during sleep, which sometimes leads to sleep disturbances, waking up in the middle of the night or very early in the morning.
A plate of soup for lunch (full, good, “heaped”) is quite a sufficient norm per day. It is best to make soups thick, so that it is a thick (vegetable) with a small amount of rich liquid, and not a liquid in itself like broth.

How to calculate the amount of liquid in soup? There is a simple, even primitive, but absolutely correct way: pour into the pan as many plates (full!) of water as the number of servings you intend to receive. Excess water will boil away during cooking, and the remaining water along with the grounds will make up just a full plate!

How to prepare and cut vegetables for soup?

Good cookbooks always indicate the shape of cutting vegetables for soup, because the taste depends on the shape. To choose the cutting form yourself, you must first look at the general composition of the soup, namely, carefully read the recipe.

The more components in the soup, the richer and tastier it should be. Hence, with a large number of components, the cutting should be larger, and with a small number, smaller. This is a general rule. If the soup is vegetable, cut the vegetables as finely as possible. If the soup is cereal, dumplings, dumplings, etc., then the vegetables are always added whole: whole carrots, onions, turnips, potatoes, etc.

Yes, because the taste of dumpling soup should be created by dumplings, cereal soup should be created by cereals, meat soup should be created by meat, and not by vegetables, the role of which in this case is to modestly complement, accompany in taste, and not stand out.

The order of adding ingredients to the soup is usually indicated in cookbooks, you just need to not neglect them. If they are not in the recipe, then you need to proceed from the cooking time of the existing components and lay them in so that they ripen at the same time.

A table of cooking times for each product is usually available in cookbooks. But, unfortunately, these tables are almost never used. Therefore, we present a typical procedure for cooking soups with meat, fish and purely vegetable.

Meat soup

1. Pour water (or boiling water), add meat, bring to a boil.

2. Add a whole onion or finely chopped onion and at the same time carrots (whole or julienned), parsley, radish, turnips, and beets. At the same time or earlier, vegetables such as legumes and sauerkraut are added to soups. But more often they are cooked separately, in parallel with the main soup in another container and mixed together towards the end of cooking.

3. After 30 minutes, you can add potatoes, cereals - wheat, rice, buckwheat.

4. 35 - 40 minutes after the start of cooking, you can add fresh cabbage of various types, zucchini, etc.

5. After 45 minutes - 1 hour - tomatoes, pickles, apples (sour).

6. After 1 hour 20 minutes - spices (second batch of onions or green onions, garlic, dill, and salt, etc.). At the same time or a little earlier, remove the onion, whole, from the soup so that it does not fall apart and its leaves, boiled with an unpleasant taste, do not spoil the soup. A Russian proverb says about such soup from a careless housewife: “You’ll spit more than you eat.”

Fish soup

1. Pour some water, add some salt, let it boil, add finely chopped onion, potatoes in wedges, bars or cubes, and carrots in strips.

2. 15 minutes after boiling, add the fish, cut into equal pieces (no more than 10x4 cm), boil for 10 - 12 minutes, add bay leaf, pepper, parsley, tarragon, and dill during the cooking process.

3. Depending on your desire, add one of the following components:
a) pickles, cucumber pickle or lemon and boil for 1 - 3 minutes;
b) tomato juice 0.5 cups or paste 2 - 3 spoons and warm over low heat, but do not bring to a boil.

Vegetable soup

From two to seven vegetable components are added so that they are similar in their cooking time: for example, all root vegetables are added at the same time and earlier than cabbage and other tender vegetables.

The onion is placed first and finely chopped. Boil vegetables over low heat until soft, then salt them, add sour cream and spices. Vegetable soups are the fastest-cooking ones.

The given standard procedure for cooking soups allows each person to prepare at least two dozen very different soups of different composition, consistency and taste.

For all the complexity of creating a good taste in soups, for all their capriciousness to conditions (freshness of food, proper utensils, sufficient time), soups have one extremely convenient property - they are very flexible and flexible in their combinations, and therefore, in order to prepare a tasty soup, no the need to memorize its exact recipe.

You just need to learn the above rules, understand their meaning and remember the order of adding products to the main types of soups. The rest is the result of your free creativity.

But since novice cooks have a very strong admiration for a certain recipe, I will point out those ways of improving and varying the taste of soups, methods of changing their composition, which are usually not included in any recipes in cookbooks and which at the same time give every beginner an excellent opportunity become the “original” creator of soup and thereby quickly get used to independent and more varied cooking, quickly give up pedantically clinging to a recipe like a blind man to a wall.

The main possibility of varying soups and improving their taste is not in changing and replenishing their solid part, but in changing the usual composition of the liquid part.

This secret is no longer a matter of ABC. It is difficult to come to the idea of ​​the very possibility of modifying the liquid part, because this part is traditionally the most stable. There are peoples who make soups only with water, for example, this is Russian national cuisine. There are peoples who make soups primarily with milk, as is customary in Estonian national cuisine and partly in Finnish.

And there are also national cuisines that allow the preparation of soups with kvass, and with beer, and with vegetable or fruit juices, or that do not use water at all in soups, but pour separately prepared solid part, sometimes not even boiled, but either raw , or fried, with sour dairy products: ayran, katyk, sour cream. These are the Central Asian national cuisines, where raw chopped young vegetables, doused with katyk, give the cold summer soup chalop, and fried pieces of meat, boiled in boiling water with fat and vegetables, form shurpa.

Finally, there are a number of ancient national cuisines that have developed an exceptionally masterly and complex structure of soup liquid, providing the finest solutions from a mixture of water, egg yolk, various acids, such as citric, lactic, as well as the introduction of fermented milk products that do not coagulate even at boiling point !

But this is preceded by subtle culinary “tricks” using starchy mucus, decoctions, eggs and the use of other techniques (for example, introducing small stones, thin aspen sticks, silver objects into the soup) that delay this or that process or, conversely, speed it up .

Thus, the culinary creativity of a number of peoples proves that the taste of soup can be completely changed by using various liquids (or additives to them), without affecting the composition of solid products. Variations with the liquid part change the taste of the soup as a whole, and this makes it possible to literally make a revolution in the preparation of soups, allowing a beginner to immediately become a grandmaster, bypassing the stage of both the discharger and the master.

So, pay attention! Here are a few specific recipes for quickly transforming ordinary, boring soups into completely new ones to taste.

INTRODUCTION TO MILK AND FERMENTED MILK PRODUCTS IN SOUPS

Have you ever eaten fish soup with milk? Or milk soup with fish? No? Seems impossible? It's not tasty?

But try it. You have cooked ordinary fish soup, that is, you have boiled fish with vegetables or cereals (onions, carrots, potatoes, rice) for 10-12 minutes. Drain the soup or, better yet, remove the fish from it, as the vegetables will not interfere. Place the fish in a separate plate or bowl. Now take a quarter or half a glass of cold boiled (required!) water and carefully dilute a tablespoon of flour in it (wheat, rice, rye - it doesn’t matter). Shake to distribute the flour evenly. Now pour this liquid into the soup without fish boiling over low heat and stir. After boiling for two to three minutes while stirring, pour half a liter of milk into the same soup and bring the mixture to a boil, continuing to stir it.

As soon as the first signs of boiling appear after five to six minutes, taste the soup liquid with a spoon (it should be slightly cooled, not fiercely hot). If during the test you feel neither the taste of milk nor the taste of fish soup, but see that some kind of unknown to you, but clearly pleasant symbiosis has been created, a certain indissolubility of the new soup liquid has appeared, then everything is in order and you can put fish in the soup .

The soup, now with fish, needs to be heated for one or two minutes, and it is ready. Let it sit, like all soups, for 10 minutes, and then eat to your health. I guarantee that this will give you a new culinary pleasure.

It would seem like a small trick, almost imperceptible, take out the fish (one!), add a spoonful of flour (two!) - a trifle, but it is a complete guarantee that the milk will not curdle, and, in addition, the taste is completely new.

Otherwise, even very fresh milk will curdle in 50 cases out of 100 if it comes into too sharp contact with fish broth, not to mention the taste that we got and the velvety quality that will bring you surprise and pleasure, of course, with quick Hastily combining milk with broth will not work.

Using the same scheme, you can add milk to vegetable soups made from root vegetables, but without sour vegetables.

Another culinary trick with soup can be done not with sweet, but with sour milk or with some fermented milk product - katyk, sour cream, suzma.

It's even easier here. But the taste is excellent. Take the following set of products: potatoes, carrots, onions, tomatoes. Literally just a piece or two. This soup is convenient when there are few vegetables, but you need to feed several people. And add one to one and a half cups of rice to this set. Cut the vegetables as finely as possible, just don’t rush with the tomatoes, they should be added at the very end.

Pour a lot of water, add rice to boiling water, cook it until half cooked, then add vegetables (according to the rules already familiar to us) and cook over high heat with the lid open until almost all of the water has boiled away. As soon as this happens, pour half a liter of sour cream or half a liter of katyk or yogurt into the resulting liquid porridge. Your soup is ready. Its liquid part is almost without water, fermented milk. And the taste is very unusual and tantalizingly appetizing. Give it a try. Just remember to add salt at the end of cooking.

Due to the ease of preparation, this soup of the Pamir peoples is just right for beginners in cooking. Here you don't have to adjust the soup liquid to taste. Sour cream or yogurt will do this for you. You can add garlic, parsley, dill to the hot porridge before pouring sour cream, and the taste will improve even more: it will become “thick”, “strong”, “bright”.

INTRODUCTION TO EGG SOUPS AND EGG PRODUCTS

Cooks from both the East and Western Europe have long sought to enrich the taste of soup liquid with eggs. And although they followed different paths, they came to one decision, one fundamental conclusion: to create an egg emulsion that can dissolve, but not coagulate in hot water, is possible only with the help of vegetable oils, acids and a small dose (sometimes drops) alcohol.

This discovery was made in different parts of the world and at different times. In Asia, in Armenia and Georgia - during the time of the Argonauts, several centuries BC; in ancient Media and Assyria, perhaps even earlier. But here it peacefully dozed for almost two and a half millennia, enriching only the local menu of the peoples of Iran, Transcaucasia and Turkey with several types of soups, into the liquid of which either one yolk, or a yolk with a small part of the white, or the whole egg or just the white was introduced .

In Europe, in Spain (on the Balearic Islands), in the 17th century, two thousand years later, the same culinary discovery was repeated. However, here it served as the basis for the creation of the now familiar mayonnaise and thereby acquired wide and lasting world fame.

But things did not come to the creation of egg-emulsion soups in Europe. European cooks did not consider it possible to dilute an egg in water to a colloidal state so that it could not coagulate even in hot water. We settled on mayonnaise. In soups, they found it possible to introduce only a whole, not dissolved, but the so-called poached egg, that is, one that would float in the soup without curdling.

To do this, part of the soup liquid of the already completely prepared soup is poured from a saucepan into a wide porcelain or earthenware cup, a little wine vinegar or lemon juice is added there (half a glass per half liter - a liter of soup), previously whipped with a spoon of sunflower or olive oil, and, stirring all this, they lower a fresh egg there. This is one of the secrets: they don’t drive the egg in there, but lower it.

This means that the egg is first carefully broken and just as carefully poured into a saucer or a separate clean plate so that the yolk does not break, but floats on the white. Then, when the mixture of soup with wine vinegar has been prepared in another bowl, an egg is carefully poured into it from the saucer, or, as the cooks say, an egg is lowered into it.

This is tailoring.

What's the point of this subtlety?

If you immediately beat an egg into a ready-made boiling or hot soup, it will instantly curdle, and, in addition, it will curl extremely ugly: some kind of grayish threads, flagella, nodules, not to mention the fact that it will be tasteless, and for the soup itself it won't be of any use. It will simply be a foreign additive that does not suit your taste.

If we pour an egg into a mixture of soup (water) and acid, and even whipped with butter, and at a slightly reduced temperature compared to hot soup, then the egg not only will not curdle, but from the acid it will acquire elasticity and enhance its bright, brilliant color . In addition, it will be cooked just so that it will be neither liquid nor solid, but jellyfish-shaped. And therefore, in the soup it will float not on the surface, but in the middle of the liquid, like a submarine. This soup is very effective.

The fact that acid creates the conditions for sewing is clear. But why pour an egg from a special plate into a cup, and not immediately beat it into it? At first glance, this technique seems completely unnecessary. However, in cooking there are no unnecessary trifles. It is in them that sometimes lies the key to an important result.

If you try to immediately drive an egg into a cup with a mixture of soup and acid, then, firstly, it may spread, and if this happens in a separate plate, then the egg can be replaced with another. Consequently, one of the reasons for this manipulation is precaution, which is always useful in the culinary business, where it is easy to spoil and difficult or impossible to correct.

But this is not all and not the main thing.

The main thing is that no matter how carefully we try to crack the egg into the cup, we cannot change the laws of physics. The egg may not spread, and a skilled cook will never spread, but it will inevitably fall vertically with the acceleration of gravity according to Newton’s famous law! This means that the egg will inevitably break through a thin layer of vinegar-oil light film, which will float on the surface of the soup and fall directly into the soup, into the water. Thus, all our precautions will be unnecessary. You might as well just crack an egg into a soup pot. Therefore, we will spoil the egg in the soup in the same way.

The most ancient civilizations of Asia created an even more complex and at the same time even simpler combination for introducing eggs into soups. The egg is first beaten, with the yolk and white separated, and then combined. This way it takes a little longer, but it is much better, higher quality and more accurate. Then add citric, pomegranate or tartaric acid (pomegranate juice, wine vinegar, sour dry wine) to the beaten egg and beat again into a homogeneous mass - liquid. This is the first step, the first stage.

The second step is to thicken the soup liquid itself, the broth (water), before adding the egg. We are already familiar with this technique - it involves adding flour to the soup (water). But you cannot dissolve the flour in hot water - nothing will come of it, because the flour will boil into a clot or pellets. You need to dilute the flour in cold boiled water, and then pour this mixture into the hot soup and stir. There should be more flour than for fish soup with milk - two to two and a half spoons per liter.

After this comes the third stage, the third step.

Introducing a beaten egg, even with acid and even into thickened soup, is still dangerous: the egg will curdle - it is very tender, and the soup (water) is too hot. What to do?

A solution was found. It turned out, as always happens in such cases, to be very simple. The whole subtlety is that you need to pour part of the soup from the main mass into a cup and mix it with a beaten egg. The soup should be a little more than half as much as the egg, and a little more not in weight, but in volume. And since the egg, beaten with acid, has sharply increased its volume, then you should take about 65-70 percent of the soup, but no more. Only in this case the egg does not coagulate, but... combines perfectly with water into a colloidal solution. You just need to beat it thoroughly. And then pour this egg-soup mixture into the rest of the soup. In this way, the dissolved egg firmly loses its ability to coagulate, even ending up in hot, ready-made soup removed from the stove. This is how many Armenian, Georgian, Turkish, Persian and Moldavian soups arose.

As for the soups of the Kurds, Arabs, Aisors and Syrians, only one yolk is most often introduced into them. It's much easier. In addition, introducing a whole egg gives a slightly worse taste and requires more salt and acid.

It must be remembered that after pouring the egg-acid-soup mixture from the cup directly into the hot soup, you must continuously stir it vigorously with a wooden spoon for at least 7 minutes. Only after this can you be sure that the egg will not curl. But the soup acquires a surprisingly elastic and dense, absolutely elastic consistency, not to mention a completely unusual taste.

It should also be borne in mind that soups with dissolved eggs require that their broth be prepared with an increased amount of onions (three to five onions per 1 liter of water). This is one of the most original achievements of culinary invention of the past - egg soup.

Subsequently, in Europe, this achievement of culinary specialists of the Ancient East was developed and supplemented with new elements - they began to combine an oriental-style beaten egg with sour milk and beer and introduce it in this composition into soups, especially bread ones. This also gave interesting taste effects and expanded the repertoire of soups.

It remains to say a few words about the bread soups we mentioned.

They are simple in composition and technology. But here the preliminary preparation of the material, the raw materials, is important.

For bread soups, you don’t need just any bread, but carefully dried crackers from well-baked rye bread. Such crackers must be dried by yourself and specially. You should not use stale bread for bread soups. It will be tasteless, even disgusting. But properly made bread soup is delicious.

First of all, let's take care of the breadcrumbs. A loaf of fresh black bread should be cut into thin narrow slices and dried over low, gentle heat in the oven, without allowing the bread to burn.

Pour boiling water over these fragrant crumbly crackers and leave for two hours. To speed up the drying time, you can grind them in a coffee grinder or food processor and pour boiling water over them. Then the mass will cook faster. But you don’t just need to soak the crackers. It is necessary that they ripen into a gelatinous mass, which acquires a special taste. And ripening takes time, at least an hour for ground crackers.

Then you need to put this gelatinous bread mass on low heat, and all cooking must take place in an enamel bowl. Here you need to be especially careful.

The bread mass should warm up, but under no circumstances boil. That is why it is poured, if not with boiling water, then always with boiled water.

Bread is a ready-made, baked (that is, a kind of boiled!) product. To boil it again means to spoil it, to decompose it into its component parts. Thus, boiling in bread soups is eliminated. Sometimes they are prepared in a water bath.

As soon as the bread mass has warmed up, add a little sugar, or better yet honey, or both. Then dried fruits are introduced, most often raisins, pears, prunes, fruits that do not have acid, or fresh apples of sweet table varieties, such as cinnamon, also lacking sourness. You can add plums and any non-acidic jam - quince, strawberry, cherry, pear, yellow plums, etc. During the process of slow heating, the bread mass should organically combine with the sweet fruit and honey part.

Only when complete diffusion occurs will the bread soup acquire its true taste and turn into a delicacy.

Quite often this moment (and it is determined only by trial and skill) is not waited for and they eat soup that is actually half cooked, a semi-finished product, thinking that it turned out well anyway.

But this moment will come only when, in addition to the indicated components, you add more spices to the bread soup - cinnamon, star anise, cloves - each on the tip of a knife, and put well-whipped heavy cream on top (one or two large spoons).

Anyone who has never tried real bread soup in his life (a “soup” only in name, but in essence a delicacy) has undoubtedly made a gap in his culinary and taste education.

We dwelled in detail on the cooking of various products and especially on the preparation of soups, based on their significance in the culinary art.

Now that we have thus passed, as it were, the equator in our culinary course, we can safely move on to more complex culinary techniques - frying and stewing.

In the vast majority of recipes, opposite the words salt is written “to taste.” But how to determine how much it is?

If you are a novice cook, a recommendation “to taste” will confuse you. Especially if you need to salt the dish before cooking, when you can’t taste it. For example, marinated shish kebab or cutlets. You won't try raw minced meat.

The authors of the recipes are also understandable. This very taste is very different from person to person; moreover, tastes differ in different countries and even regions of the same state. For example, in Armenia they like heavily salted dishes, but in Northern Europe, for our Russian taste, they don’t add enough salt. Even the habits of Siberians and residents of the Black Earth Region are very different. The first ones often do not salt their food at all, but southerners, especially from fishing areas, put a lot of salt in their food.

Foods and salt interact according to their own laws; let’s try to give some tips that will help you calculate the right amount of salt.

Please note that we take very average figures; this is a kind of base, based on which you can understand how much salt you will need for your dishes. The quantity is given for finely ground salt, the most common one, not sea salt and not iodized. Coarse salt interacts with foods differently.

Fish

It usually requires a lot of salt to prepare it. When frying fish, you need to grate it about 2-3 tsp. salt per kilogram of fish.

If you boil it, then add about 3 tsp. salt.

If you are making soup, you can add a little more to 3 tablespoons, keeping in mind that vegetables and potatoes will “eat up” some of the salt.

By the way, the fish needs to be salted at the beginning of boiling.

Meat

But meat doesn’t like a lot of salt. It's just salty. Therefore, it is important not to over-salt lean meat; it is better not to add salt; with fatty meat, however, you don’t have to stand on ceremony.

Minimal salt is necessary if the meat will be fried over an open fire. A teaspoon per kilogram of meat is enough.

Minced cutlet is quite fatty, it contains bread, it will need 0.5 tablespoon per kilogram.

Baked meat will take about 1/3 tablespoon per kilo of raw meat.

You also need to put salt in the sweet dough, but 1 pinch is enough for it. Just to make the taste more prominent.

Yeast dough needs more salt - 2-3 pinches per kulebyak (about 1 kg of dough)

Puff pastry is fatty. It will tolerate ½ tsp. per kilogram.

Porridge

Buckwheat porridge itself is slightly salty. It is often not salted at all. But you can put 2-3 small pinches of salt on a glass of cereal. Per kilogram of cereal you will need about 1 tsp. salt.

The rice needs more salt, it is quite bland. For a glass of cereal - 1 tsp. salt, per kilogram - 4.

A cauldron of pilaf per kilogram of rice with fatty lamb will take approximately 1.5 tablespoons of salt.

Potato

When boiling potatoes, it is better to salt the water about 10 minutes after boiling.

To adjust the taste, you can taste the water, it should be salty. For 1 kg of boiled potatoes you will need about ½ tablespoon of salt.

The same goes for making purees.

Vegetables

Here it is better to under-salt than to over-salt. Moreover, you need to add salt at the end of cooking, since salt causes many vegetables to become tough.

Also keep in mind that juicy vegetables will release juice when exposed to salt. So if you need tomato sauce, then it is better to salt the tomatoes at the beginning of stewing.

For vegetable stew, calculate the portions: for 1 person, approximately 3 g of salt for garnish.

This means that a pan of stewed vegetables for 4 people will require approximately 1.5 tsp. salt (at the rate of 1 tsp - 7 g of salt).

If you put it in heaps, then consider that there are about 10 grams in 1 spoon.

Soups

They are usually salted at the end of cooking so that all the vegetables are already ready by the time the salt is added.

Also calculate the required amount based on the servings: 1 serving – ½ tsp. salt, maybe a little less.

A three-liter saucepan holds 6-8 servings of regular soup. Therefore, it will require 3 tsp. salt.

Pasta, dumplings and more

When preparing pasta and other things that need to be boiled in water or broth (lazy dumplings, dumplings, dumplings, etc.), it is the liquid that is salted.

And not too much, it should be lightly salted.

You can put no more than 1 tsp per liter of pasta water. salt without a slide. For dumplings, less is better - about 0.5 tsp.

Subtleties

• Pickles and solyankas (since they contain salty ingredients: cucumbers, olives, smoked meats) need to be salted just a little.


• fillings for pies and dumplings are heavily salted. It is taken into account that some of the salt will be absorbed into the flour shell.


• You need to test the salt when the dish has cooled down; when it is hot, it may seem like there is too little salt, and as a result you will get an over-salted soup.


• When frying eggplants, you need to salt the oil in which they are fried. Vegetables will take up as much salt as they need and will not be oversalted.


• Salads are salted immediately before serving. If mayonnaise or other salty sauce is added to them, then there is no need to add salt.


• If you test the saltiness of dishes too often, the taste will dull and they will seem unsalted.


• When boiling something, you can taste the broth or water for saltiness. If they “look” normally salted, then the product that is cooked in them will be salted normally.


• The salt in different packs may be slightly different. Sometimes it is less salty, sometimes more. To avoid discrepancies, it is better to always use the same brand of salt.

Salt is an essential food additive that has long been present in the human gastronomic world. Despite modern contradictions between benefits and harms, it is rarely possible to completely eliminate it from the diet. It is almost impossible to prepare a delicious soup without salt, because it adds an interesting taste to the dish. But what to do if you over-salted the soup and how to salt it correctly to avoid this?

Unfortunately, there is no universal rule, since much depends on individual preferences. However, some general rules still exist:

• Most dishes are recommended to be salted at the last stage of cooking;
• Solyanka is salted in small quantities, since it contains salty components;
• Before testing the dish for salt, it must be cooled, otherwise it may seem less salty;
• When checking a soup for salt, just taste the broth;
• try the dish no more than twice, otherwise sensitivity to salt may become dulled and you won’t notice the saltiness;
• salt from different manufacturers may have different concentrations, so it is better to choose a specific brand and use only that one.

What to do if you over-salt your soup?

Depending on the type of soup, the method for solving the problem may differ. To avoid confusion, you can use the following recommendations:

• Soupwith vermicelli can be corrected by adding a bag of rice or flour for 10 minutes.
• What to do if you have over-salted cabbage soup, borscht, solyanka or tomato soup? Just add a small amount of lemon juice or apple cider vinegar.
• You can throw a handful of rice into the pickle or green cabbage soup or add a raw egg.
• Adding tomato paste or sour cream will help with the problem with any “red” soup.
• Lemon will perfectly correct fish soup and solyanka.
• Soup-Mashed potatoes can be saved by adding cream.
• Bean, chicken, mushroom or pea soup will be improved by adding a raw egg.
• The excess salt will be absorbed by the peeled potatoes. If the first dish is thick enough, the “auxiliary” potatoes can be removed and used as a side dish or added to a salad. In empty soup, you can simply mash the potatoes and leave them.
• Cereals such as rice, buckwheat or millet absorb salt perfectly. The cereal must be wrapped in cheesecloth and placed in a pan. The bundle can remain there until completely cooked.
• Chicken eggs are great for fixing heavily salted fish soup or other fish dishes. The egg is broken into a bowl, mixed and carefully poured into the soup. What to do if a liquid dish with boiled eggs is not eaten in the family? You can simply remove them with a slotted spoon before serving.
• Instead of cereal, you can add wheat flour, wrapped in clean gauze or cloth, to a pan with over-salted soup. After some time, the bag is removed. The disadvantage of this method is the appearance of turbidity in the broth.

How to properly salt various dishes

Different dishes require different amounts of salt, but at what stage should food be salted and in what amount?

Soups

It is better to salt the soup when all its components are cooked. In a three-liter saucepan, 3 teaspoons of salt are enough.

Meat

The meat does not require much salt because it is not completely bland. This is what causes problems during cooking. A teaspoon of salt is needed per kilogram of steak cooked over an open fire; half a teaspoon is added per kilogram of baked meat. How much salt do you need per kg of minced meat? Half a teaspoon is enough.

Fish

Fish is not salted like other products. Before you start cooking, you need to rub it with salt. Per kilogram you need 3 teaspoons. When it comes to preparing fish soup, it is better to add 4 tablespoons, since some of the salt will be absorbed by other ingredients. Fish dishes are salted before cooking.

Vegetables

Salt gives vegetables juiciness. It is better to salt them towards the end of cooking, otherwise they may become tougher. When frying eggplants, it is necessary to salt the oil used for cooking. There is no need to salt the fruit itself. Boiled potatoes are salted 15 minutes after boiling. A teaspoon of salt is enough for a kilogram of potatoes.

Pasta and dumplings

Any dishes made from unleavened dough that are cooked with broth or water must be salted while the liquid is boiling. It is from the broth that the dish will absorb the required amount of salt. For pasta you need 1 teaspoon per liter of water, for dumplings or dumplings - half a spoon.

Sweet pastries

Sweet baked goods are salted to emphasize the sweetness and airiness of the dough. For sweet dough, one pinch per kilogram is enough, and for yeast dough, two. A teaspoon of salt is added per kilogram of puff pastry prepared with an oil base.

How to save dishes from excess salt

There are methods that will help you cope with the problem using products.

What to do if you oversalt your meat or fish?

Over-salting meat is a complex problem that requires some sacrifices: the taste of the dish will most likely suffer, but you will still be able to save it from the trash. The meat must be removed and washed in cold water. After this, it is kept on fire for some time.

Grilled, lightly salted fish can be treated with the addition of lemon juice.

What to do if you over-salt your mashed potatoes?

In this case, adding some unsalted mashed potatoes helps. If this option is not suitable, then you can use butter. Many people like potatoes with the addition of butter, which adds tenderness, mutes the salty taste and makes the mashed potatoes thicker.

How to fix rice?

The most suitable method in this case is to rinse with plenty of cool water. The lower the water temperature, the better the end result. Washed rice will become more attractive and will get rid of excess salt.

Correcting over-salted porridge, buckwheat and other cereals

If the porridge was prepared with milk, then you can get rid of the oversalting by adding a small amount more. Otherwise, it is better to use peeled raw potatoes, which will absorb excess salt.

How to avoid oversalting

There are several small tricks that will help you avoid repeating mistakes in the future:

• taste food while cooking, but not too often, once or twice is enough;
• study the components of the dish in advance for its salt content;
• remember: you can always add salt to taste, but it’s less common to save soup and other dishes from over-salting!