The Kitchn Archive: Oct 2011

Homemade soup is so much tastier than the store-bought canned stuff (and often healthier, too). Fortunately, it’s possible to can your own soups from chicken stock to carrot soup to chili, and for the most part it’s pretty simple … but there are a few important guidelines.• Use a pressure canner: Unlike fruits and tomatoes, soup is a low-acid food and cannot be safely preserved using the boiling water bath method (and definitely not the upside-down jar method).

If you’re trying to adapt a regular soup recipe to your slow cooker or improve one you’ve already made, here are a few slow-cooking tips to help you make the best soup ever.1. Ingredients to Add at the Beginning Some ingredients stand up to, and benefit from, longer cooking times more than others. All of these can be added at the very start of cooking.

No matter what equipment you have in your kitchen or how perfectly creamy you prefer your soups, here are some tips to help you puree your next soup.1. Choose Your Equipment – When it comes time to puree a soup, our main choices are a blender, a food processor, or an immersion blender. Each has their pros and cons:• Blenders – Blenders do a great job of pureeing soups.

When it’s time to make a batch of stock, I don’t head to the grocery store. I just open the freezer. Inside I keep freezer bags full of scraps that by themselves are inedible, but when simmered slowly for hours, transform into the magical elixir that is from-scratch stock. So what should you be saving instead of tossing in the trash? • Bones and carcasses: Whenever I roast a chicken, I wrap up the carcass in foil and store it in the freezer a freezer bag.

Have you ever made a soup that was well-salted and full of flavorful components, but tasted a little…flat? There’s an easy fix you might be overlooking. Just add acid! A small amount of an acidic ingredient like lemon juice added at the end of cooking brightens flavors, especially in long-simmered bean soups or rich meat-based soups. Start with a little bit of acid, taste and adjust, until your soup tastes balanced and bright.

An overly salty soup is no one’s idea of a good meal, and this comes from a self-professed salt fiend! Here are two tricks to get the seasoning just right…and what to do when you realize you were maybe still a bit too heavy-handed.Think about salting at the beginning and the end. The first step of almost any soup is to sauté the vegetables to bring out their flavor and get them started cooking.

It sounds like a rumor on the elementary school playground: figs have digested wasps in them! Except that unlike most grade school legends, this one is actually true. This week The Atlantic shared a fascinating excerpt from the science blog Oscillator, which explains the symbiotic relationship between certain fig trees and the wasps that pollinate them. Figs are technically inverted flowers that store their pollen inside the fruits.

Pears and apples and quince! Figs and persimmons and pomegranates! Grapes and kiwi and fresh dates! Some of the most delicious fruits come to us in the autumn. It can be confusing to figure out how to store them, as every fruit has different requirements. Some ripen on the tree, some afterwards. Some need refrigeration, some don’t. Read on for our guide on how to store autumn fruits.

If you’ve ever whacked a cut open pomegranate with a wooden spoon or fumbled around with it under water, then you know extracting those lovely seeds (also called arils) is a messy endeavor. But it doesn’t have to be this way! Read on for my favorite way to extract the arils from a pomegranate! Pomegranates are a beautiful fall-to-winter fruit, delicious and full of antioxidants, too.

Q: I bought two big jars of 100% cranberry juice at a half-off sale, and am looking for some suggestions on how to use them!So far I have just been adding a little to my water bottle, but thus far am only halfway through the first jar!Sent by SaraEditor: Sara, you could try the juice in a holiday cocktail, or you could skip the puree step in this recipe for cranberry squares with walnut shortbread crust, and just use the juice.Readers, what else would you suggest?Next question?

Pasta is treat enough for many people — they push back from the table and don’t want a bite more to eat. But what if you’re someone who likes to end a meal with something sweet, even if you just had a big plate of rich pasta? What’s the best dessert to follow a pasta feast? Personally, I feel that something very light is best after a pasta meal. Sometimes I forgo dessert entirely and have a glass of port or another dessert wine instead.

From permanent markers to chalk, we keep all sorts of writing implements in the kitchen. Another indispensable tool is the grease pencil.Made from non-toxic wax, grease pencils (also known as wax pencils or china markers) can be used to write on all sorts of non-porous surfaces from porcelain dishes to glass jars, metal canning lids, and plastic containers.