Soups, chili and gumbo containing relatively lean meat are healthy foods which most people enjoy eating. And, due to the high free (unbound) water content sit-down restaurants make plenty of money selling such entrees. Cooking soups (includes chili and gumbo) at home often entails too much effort to fit in well with the fast pace of modern life. Combining on-hand ingredients, as desired to taste isn’t bad, but the time required to stand by the stove, stirring the pot, can quickly dissuade many from participating home soup preparation. Other than Chinese food, soups may well be the best liked food style for providing more vegetables in our diets. Raw vegetables are proclaimed to be most nutritious, but if one does not like eating raw vegetables cooking them to a somewhat crunchy state in soups seems like a healthy compromise. Further, eating soup is an enjoyable way of aiding in adequate body hydration.
A frugal solution is oven cooking a large rectangular roaster full of soup during weekends or when otherwise off work for the day. I oven-cook soups at 350F; large batches only require stirring every 45 minutes or so. For safety, leave the roasting pan on the oven rack when stirring and during initial batch cool-down. Donning oven mitts, tilt the roaster lid away from you whenever uncovering a batch of hot soup. Steam will go right through thin or wet cloth materials. About now you may be saying to yourself, “this practice sounds workable, but that’s just too much soup for me to cook at one time.” Most people believe that they deserve a daily variety of food; all while too often ending up eating the same types of fast-convenient-highly processed foods day after day. I eat high quality, healthy soups all the time either at home or packed in work lunches to microwave reheat. However, my variety of soup types is more on a weekly basis instead of daily. Soup flavors mellow and blend after the first 3 or 4 days, making for even more enjoyable eating experiences. A long boiled soup that is chilled fairly rapidly then held in refrigeration will maintain good eating qualities for around 10 days. Food acids, such as those in tomato products, will further enhance a soup’s shelf-life. One can freeze soup, but it’s more work/expense and takes away from how conveniently it can be reheated for consumption.
General soup making tips: Don’t over-cook browned ground meat (add it toward the end of cooking or stir into a batch after it cools), always use onion, use a small amount of crushed garlic in most soups, use celery and carrots often, if thickening the soup with flour stir it into the diced vegetables before adding any liquid or wet-packed ingredients, avoid canned broths and bouillon cubes (expensive saltwater or MSG), use brown sugar to take the bite off peppers and acid food ingredients, frozen greens can easily be finely diced if not totally thawed, salt can be added at any time so don’t over do it at the start, consider adding sodium phosphate to uncured meats in order to enhance meat moisture retention and to inhibit warmed-over-flavor development, dice potatoes small so they will soften before other vegetables over-cook, don’t add vinegar to a batch until after potatoes have cooked soft, only add summer squash near the end of a soup cook so they stay semi-firm, over spicing a soup will often limit the number of people that will eat it (more spice can be added at the table), use only fresh or frozen vegetables (retorting during canning over-cooks most veggies).
Beef-Vegetable soup batch:
Notice flour and brown sugar in above picture. Flour won’t clump when stirred in with “dry” diced veggies. This early addition practice also assures that flour will cook long enough to not leave any uncooked bread taste in the finished batch.
Spices, water and tomato products are added in this picture, then batch was covered and placed in a 350F oven.
Thin slicing and dicing a partially frozen Choice chuck-eye roast. Thick fat was removed. Chuck roast was put in freezer storage when I made various meat items from a wholesale case of chuck rolls.
Meat was salted in layers to help in cooked meat moisture retention and to season batch, more salt can be added to taste at the end of cooking. Sodium phosphate was not used this time, but when used needs to be mixed in water, before salt, and blended into meat well. Small, thin pieces of chuck roast become tender with minimal cooking. The little bit of beef fat in marbling etc. will add flavor. Water-soluble meat protein, vitamins and minerals enrich the broth with both. Meat was added while the rest of batch was still getting warmed-up in the oven.
Soups can be made to be a healthy, inexpensive, convenient dietary staple. Meat does not always have to be the “center of the plate;” it can simply be used as a great ingredient to blend in with a other types of food.