The 15 BEST Ham Soup Recipes (2024)

FAQs

What makes a bowl of soup more flavorful? ›

Perk up a Bland Soup With Simple Pantry Staples

Add a splash of vinegar (any kind!), or a squeeze of citrus. Chances are, you could use a little more salt. Go ahead—it's ok. Salt perks up flat flavors and helps balance out bitter-tasting ingredients.

All soups and stews must have three major components in order to be tasty: an undercurrent liquid, aromatics, and volumizing ingredients. In every case, they're layered together until all of the flavors meld together in a harmonious, silky balance.

Not Adding Acid

If a soup is tasting bland in the bowl, consider adding acid rather than salt. A squeeze of lemon or lime, or a dash of yogurt or sour cream can add brightness to the bowl.

Even the simplest vegetable stock — an onion, a carrot, a celery stalk, a few other scraps, cooked together for 20 minutes — can make a difference in most soups. And a grand, full-flavored chicken, meat, or fish stock is good enough to serve on its own.

So to recap and for a quick rule-of-thumb, stock is made with cleaned animal bones. Broth uses bones with meat still on them, or meat alone. And soup is made from either broth or stock, and has other ingredients added to it for texture and flavour.

For clear, brothy soups, stock is your most important ingredient. If you want to make a good soup, you need to use an excellently flavored stock — otherwise, the entire pot could be tasteless.

Foods that have a great deal of acidity, like lemon juice, vinegar, white wine, and tomato puree, can help liven up the flavor of bland-tasting bone and other broths. "The acidity of these ingredients works to complement and enhance the broth's flavors, not mask it.

It may sound a bit strange and unusual for some, but vinegar is a common ingredient in some soup recipes, and there is a good reason for it. If you think about it, vinegar is really a flavor-enhancer (umami). That's why it is so often used in cooking, sauces, and salad dressings. The same is true with soups.

Vinegar – A spoonful of vinegar is a quick fix when you find yourself with a bowl of dull, flat-tasting soup. Just a small amount of acid will brighten up the flavors. 2. Soy Sauce – Soy sauce is another item that's ideal for brightening up and adding depth of flavor to an otherwise dull soup.

A soup's quality is determined by its flavor, appearance and texture. A good soup should be full-flavored, with no off or sour tastes. Flavors from each of the soup's ingre- dients should blend and complement, with no one flavor overpowering another.

What vegetables can you not put in soup? ›

Foods in the Brassica family, such as Bok Choy, are too strong for stock/broth and can impart a bitter taste. Foods in the Brassica family, such as broccoli, are too strong for stock/broth and can impart a bitter taste.

While certain vegetables can work just fine added directly to simmering soups and stews (say, carrots and celery), other vegetables (onions, garlic, and the like) will almost always need at least a brief sweat in a fat-based liquid before adding the remaining ingredients.

These are added for the final 4–5 minutes of cooking so that they're tender but nowhere near mushy. You get the sweet luxury of long-cooked vegetables and the freshness of crisp-tender ones.

In most cases, stock and broth are interchangeable. If you're in the soup aisle and can't remember whether the recipe called for stock or broth, either will do for making soup, gravy, or a flavorful pot of rice or grains. Keep in mind that stock is unseasoned, and broth is seasoned.

Enhance a range of dishes - from ham hock risotto to ham broth and even minestrone soup - simply by adding a Knorr Ham Stock Cube to your cooking.

As a result, stock is usually a healthier product, delivering a richer mouth feel and deeper flavor than broth. Stock is a versatile culinary tool that can deliver taste to any number of dishes. Darker in color and more concentrated in flavor than broth, it's ideal for use in soups, rice, sauces and more.

In fact, these treatments released additional bioactive peptides, suggesting that the use of ham bones to make broths and stews could have a positive impact on cardiovascular health.