Healthy vegetable soup

What makes vegetable soup taste like something

Vegetable soup has a reputation for being bland, and it usually deserves it. Vegetables simmered in broth give up their color and texture but not much flavor. Three small steps in this recipe change that.

• Cook the base properly. Give the onion, carrot and celery a full 8 to 10 minutes, until soft and sweet, before anything wet goes in.
• Brown the tomato paste. Two minutes in the hot oil turns it from sharp and raw to deep and savory. You will see it darken.
• Finish with acid. A tablespoon of lemon juice at the end brightens every vegetable in the pot. Taste the soup before and after adding it, and you will taste the difference.

A Parmesan rind simmered in the broth adds a savory depth that is hard to get any other way. Keep rinds in a bag in the freezer for exactly this. Parmesan is made with animal rennet, so leave the rind out for a vegetarian or vegan pot.

Add the vegetables in stages

Potatoes and green beans need 15 minutes. Zucchini and corn need 5, peas and spinach about 2. Put everything in at once and you get mushy zucchini and gray peas next to potatoes that are just tender. Adding the vegetables in stages means each one is cooked just right.

Use what you have

The recipe is a template rather than a rule. Roughly 10 cups of vegetables in total, not counting the onion, carrot and celery base, sorted into slow and quick, is what matters.

• Slow (15 to 20 minutes): potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, butternut squash (or blend it on its own into butternut squash soup), green beans, cabbage.
• Quick (2 to 5 minutes): zucchini, yellow squash, corn, peas, spinach, kale, chard, broccoli florets.

Frozen mixed vegetables work well in place of the corn, peas and green beans. Add them straight from frozen in the last 5 minutes.

Making it a full meal

At 150 kcal and 5 g of protein, a bowl is a light lunch or a first course rather than a dinner. Add a can of drained cannellini or chickpeas with the potatoes for more protein and fiber. Shredded rotisserie chicken added at the end works too. For pasta, add 3/4 cup of ditalini about 5 minutes before the zucchini, with an extra cup of broth, because the pasta absorbs it. With beans and pasta both, it is most of the way to a minestrone.

Beef and vegetable soup

For a beef and vegetable soup, start with 1 1/2 lb of beef chuck, trimmed and cut into 1-inch cubes. Pat it dry, season it with salt, and brown it in batches in the oil in the pot. Set it aside, cook the base in the same pot, and scrape up the browned bits as the vegetables soften. Use low-sodium beef broth in place of the vegetable broth. Return the beef with the tomatoes and broth, cover, and simmer gently for 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours, until the beef is nearly tender. Then add the potatoes and green beans and carry on with the recipe as written. A teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce with the broth suits the beef.

The beef takes up room, so use a pot of at least 7 quarts, or leave out the green beans or the corn. Chuck is the right cut here for the same reason it is in a braised beef: its connective tissue melts over a long simmer. Leaner cuts like round turn dry and stringy.

With trimmed chuck, a bowl comes to about 300 kcal, with 22 g of protein and 12 g of fat.

Hamburger vegetable soup

Hamburger soup is the weeknight version, and it needs no long simmer. Brown 1 lb of 90% lean ground beef in the pot, breaking it up, until no pink remains and it reaches 160°F. Spoon off the fat, set the beef aside, and make the soup as written with beef broth, adding the beef back with the tomatoes. Many versions add a cup of small pasta or a can of tomato sauce. If you add pasta, add an extra cup of broth with it.

With 90% lean beef, a bowl comes to about 250 kcal, with 16 g of protein and 10 g of fat.

Crock pot vegetable soup

Do the first two steps on the stove, then put the base, tomatoes, broth and slow vegetables in the crock pot. Cook on low for 6 to 8 hours or on high for 3 to 4, until the potatoes are tender. Turn it to high, add the zucchini, corn and kale for the last 30 minutes and the peas and spinach for the last 10, then stir in the lemon at the end.

• Size: the full recipe fills a 7-quart slow cooker. In a 6-quart one, cut the broth to 6 cups. A slow cooker loses very little liquid, so the soup will not be thinner for it.
• Dump-and-go: you can skip the stove and put everything in raw. The soup works, but it tastes flatter, because the base never browns.
• With beef: brown the chuck or ground beef on the stove first, then cook it with the slow vegetables. Chuck needs the full 8 hours on low to turn tender. Browned ground beef is fine at 6.

Keeping it

Four days in the fridge. It freezes well for 3 months, though the potatoes turn slightly grainy and the zucchini softens. That is fine in a soup, but leave out pasta if you plan to freeze it. Pasta goes mushy on thawing, so cook it fresh when you reheat.

What it is worth nutritionally

About 150 kcal a bowl, with about 5 g of fiber from ten different vegetables and only 4 g of fat. Soup like this is filling for very few calories because so much of it is water and fiber. A lab study at Penn State found that eating a bowl of low-calorie soup before lunch cut total calories at that meal, soup included, by about 20 percent. A bowl before dinner may be one of the easier ways to eat a little less; our cabbage soup is built around exactly that.