Soup is one of the oldest  (if not the oldest) forms of prepared food. Soup has been the way to use up whatever is left.  It has been the final meal of the week for centuries, in every culture, everywhere on the planet.

Do you know anyone who doesn’t love soup?

What single food sparks as many memories of childhood lunches, or mugs of steaming chowder in front of a roaring winter fire, or the instant comfort from the first swallow of warm chicken soup the day you catch a cold?

When I was growing up, soup was one of the first stove foods I was allowed to cook.  As cook I got to choose among the bright red labeled cans in the cupboard: Tomato, Chicken Noodle, Chicken With Rice, Bean With Bacon, Cream of Potato or Vegetable Beef. Tomato won most of the time because I could elaborate on the recipe by adding milk. I remember standing on the kitchen stool using both hands to squeeze the can opener hard enough to puncture the lid, emptying the can into the saucepan and then carefully measuring a can of water to mix with it. I turned the burner to medium and waited to inhale the first waft of whatever soup flavor bubbled in the pan.

With the exception of clam chowder that my mother made when we dug clams on Vashon Island, I have no memory of eating freshly made soup before I had my own kitchen and read Julia Child’s Mastering The Art of French Cooking. Once I cooked and tasted the food that canned soups are designed to represent, I never looked back.

I make soup four or five times a month, inspired by extras from the freezer, the refrigerator, the pantry or the garden. Occasionally after reading a food magazine, a cookbook or blog recipe, I go out and buy whatever I need to make soup from scratch. Many of those soups have tasted wonderful. But that is an expensive and time-consuming way to make a food designed to use up leftovers.

Because winter is such a good soup season, I will be sharing some of my favorite soup recipes over the next month or so.

The basic ingredient of soup is stock, and the better the stock, the better the soup. Becoming familiar with the ways different ingredients effect its taste is essential to becoming accomplished at making really good soup from what is available in your house. So before I share soup recipes I am going to tell you how to make wonderful stock.

First, here is a culinary secret most home cooks don’t know. Stock is one of the easiest and most economical foods to prepare. From beginning to end, the actual hands on preparation time for stock is less than 20 minutes. You can buy stocks at grocery stores. Several are organic, and almost all brands have a low sodium option. But the difference in both flavor and cost between store bought and home made is huge.

Chicken or Beef Stock

Ingredients

2 gallons of water
Raw vegetables (ends and tops of onions, 2 or 3 garlic cloves, two carrots, the ends of root vegetables, a stalk or two of celery…)
Leftover fresh herbs or stems of herbs
2 tbs. kosher salt
10 black peppercorns
3 or 4 soup bones or 8-10 organic chicken wings or a poultry carcass with some meat left on it

Procedure

1. Put all ingredients in a 3 gallon stockpot. Bring to a boil and reduce heat to a low but steady simmer. Cook, uncovered for 4 hours or until the liquid is reduced by half. Turn off heat and cool to room temperature.
2. Strain liquid into a large bowl or container that can be refrigerated. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until fat rises to the surface (4-6 hours).
3. Transfer stock to various freezer containers and freeze for up to 6 months.

Next come a few stock tricks I have learned.

1. The Magic Stock Bag

If you eat fresh vegetables and cook with garlic, onion and fresh herbs, you have the primary ingredients for delicious stock. All you need is a plastic bag, a tin tie and a freezer. Every time you cook, put the tips, ends and old-but-not-dead vegetables in the bag and freeze it, over and over again until you are ready to make stock.

Vegetables to Use: onions, garlic, celery, carrots, fennel, summer squash, white potatoes (skinned), tomatoes, and light colored root vegetables.

Vegetables Not To Use: A general rule is avoid ingredients that will create a weird looking color or add a strong flavor. Any of the lettuce family (not enough flavor), dark, leafy greens (spinach, chard, kale), any of the cabbage or chicory family, broccoli and its relatives, winter squash, green beans and their relatives, radishes and others with deep coloration (beets, red onions).

2. Vegetables do not have to be perfectly ripe.

Limp is OK; mold is not.

3. Flavor

In addition to bones or chicken parts, onions, garlic and herbs provide the main flavor in stock. Green onions are fine. Most light colored skins, seeds and small stems are fine too because they will strain out.

Two or three carrots add a gentle sweetness. Four or five turn the stock orange and make it way too sweet.

Leftover fresh herbs and the stems of herbs like parsley, basil, tarragon, thyme, etc. really add flavor to stock. Avoid rosemary and watch sage because a little goes a long way.

Salt and pepper are flavor boosters. Use them conservatively when the stock is cooking. Taste it when it’s cool and add more salt if necessary.

Finally, and this is important, dirt has flavor, bad flavor. Clean the dirt off vegetables before freezing or putting them in stock.

4. Freezing Stock

I use stock as a base for sauces and marinades in order to add flavored liquid to things that need it and to make soup. So I freeze stock in containers of several sizes: quarts for dinner soup and one bowl left over; pints for soup for two; half pints for sauce bases and 2 oz. containers for just a little bit.

There it is. If you haven’t made soup stock before now, I hope you will try it. I am pretty sure you won’t be disappointed. The soup recipes are on their way.