Today we're in the test kitchen
making five-ingredient soups.
[Brad] It's a perfect food soup.
It's like a hug and a bowl.
[Hana] Five ingredients are more than enough
to make a satisfying soup
But the trick is to make strategic choices.
[Chris] Each one
needs to really bring something compelling to the table.
Looking so spicy and hot and delicious
I can't wait to dig in.
[upbeat music]
My five-ingredient soup is clam chowder.
Reason being clams, shellfish of all types,
have tons of flavor.
So as far as ingredients go,
it's one that brings a lot to the table very, very quickly.
And I think it's one of those soups
that's like a very simple fast cooking amalgam, right?
Of like just a few core ingredients.
So I'm just getting the heat in there.
I'm just starting with a splash of water
just so none of the clams
kind of singe against the bottom of the pot.
[clams clanging]
I'm just gonna cook them until they start to open,
and I'm gonna pull them out as they open.
[pot lid clinking]
They're gonna cook further in the chowder,
so like there's not really a danger
of you undercooking them necessarily, if that makes sense.
You know, different clams
take different amounts of time to open.
Shellfish, much like using a mandolin, don't get greedy.
You know, if one is taken just a little too long to open,
all the other ones are done,
give it a minute after that minute, you know what?
Don't bother.
It's just not worth it.
So this one you know, is like mostly open.
This one like what are you up to, buddy?
You're not the biggest clam in the bunch.
We're just gonna say this one isn't gonna make it.
Clams are done.
I'm gonna pick the meat out of the shell,
discard the shells, and I'm gonna pour the liquid
through a strainer just to reserve.
One thing that clams do not have is fat, right?
This is slab bacon.
Part of why I use slab bacon for this
is you can really control the cut on it.
Pre-sliced bacon is almost always too thin.
Slab bacon tends to be a good bit drier, easier to slice,
and we have these nice, thin lardon shapes
which are gonna retain some of their chew
and bounciness in the chowder.
I need to give the bacon a bit of a headstart
in terms of rendering before I put my onions in.
The bacon's really giving me a headstart on flavor here.
So starting to get some browning, lowering the heat,
I'm just gonna let it sweat out
and render a little bit more gently
just 'cause I don't want it to create
super dark fond that's gonna be picked up by the clam liquid
and water and cream
and turn it into like brown clam chatter.
This is the strained clam juice.
Doesn't look quite like water.
I mean obviously, like it doesn't really have any viscosity.
It's just slightly opalescent.
[Chris' tongue popping]
It's clammy, it's salty.
I'd say we're pretty good here.
Like it's golden and it's somewhat crisp,
but there's still a little bit of texture,
still a little bit of chewiness to the lean and the fat.
Onion.
I'm taking off just a few tablespoons of the bacon fat.
I can always introduce it later.
And now I'm gonna sweat out the onion.
I don't don't want it to brown, really.
It's probably gonna pick up a little bit of that fond.
Just get it soft.
Yukon Gold potato.
Gonna throw some water in there.
And we're gonna simmer the potato till it's tender.
I'm just gonna get the heat up a little bit.
Little cake tester.
Slide right through.
That's beautiful.
Reintroduce the clams, reintroduce the clam liquid.
Give a big splash of heavy cream, a grind of black pepper.
Just looking at the consistency.
Also, bacon can go in,
and we can reserve some bacon for topping the bowl.
I haven't added any salt to this whatsoever.
[Chris' tongue popping]
[spoon clattering]
Could you use a pinch.
So just wanna boost the heat a little bit.
Make sure that kind of simmers, flavors melt.
Okay, gonna take this to the bowl.
One of the things I also really like about Yukon Gold
is if you're looking to thicken the chowder
but you don't necessarily want it to taste creamier,
you can mash just a few pieces of the potato,
and just kind of stir it in,
and adjust the consistency that way.
And this is where a little extra bacon really does wonders.
Crack black pepper, boom, done.
Five-ingredient clam chowder.
For something that's like clams, potato,
cream, bacon, etcetera, it's like surprisingly light.
It's very satisfying.
Bacon's so clutch, cream's so clutch.
Honestly, that is like full-on delicious.
We worked within the constraints, and I think we nailed it.
[upbeat music]
My soup is a kimchi-jjigae, which is kimchi stew.
So it's something I grew up having all the time.
The version that I'm making today
is a nice kind of blueprint from which you can really go off
and use, you know, whatever meats or proteins that you have.
What would I do without the scallion?
Honestly, I've said this in every episode,
my favorite allium, it is so versatile.
Separate greens from whites,
and you could just keep it chunky.
The whites we're going to just chop or mince,
and that will serve as the aromatic base.
This is just your standard little pork chop
that you can find in any supermarket.
I prefer it with the bone in.
You can even use a little bit of ground pork
if you don't have little pork chops or pork tenderloins.
Cut around the bone.
And it's okay if you have some fat.
This is a pretty lean cut anyway.
So don't throw this out,
we're going to throw that in with the soup.
And then this,
we're just going for, you know, bite-sized pieces.
Not too small, not too big.
So here is our tofu.
We're using firm today.
You can use soft, you can use extra firm.
I prefer firm
'cause it won't completely disintegrate in the stew.
Cut it like right into your palm being very careful.
It's super fun cutting tofu
because it's just really satisfying.
The star ingredient is the kimchi.
Fermented cabbage, a staple of the Korean diet.
I don't know if you can tell,
but do you see how like the lid here is a little bulbous?
That means that it's really gassy.
The riper your kimchi is,
the more delicious your kimchi-jjigae will be.
This is already cut kimchi, mak-kimchi.
You want all of it, all of the seasoning,
the dicon, the scallion.
Kimchi in itself has so much going on inside,
so it's like a real bonus ingredient.
Again, you don't want it to be minuscule,
but bite-sized so it can fit on your spoon.
Just envision the pieces on your spoon.
So I'm starting with sesame oil.
It's what gives it it's really nice,
toasty sesame, nutty flavor.
Add our pork.
The bone is what's going to really infuse the broth,
the water.
Just spread it out across the surface of your cooking vessel
and try not to touch it.
Season.
[dish sizzling]
Just let them hang out,
you want it to develop caramelized crust on the outside.
See?
Even just a little bit of color
will make a difference in our kimchi-jjigae.
Get the aromatics in.
Season a little bit every step of the way.
Once most of the pink of the pork has disappeared,
you can add your kimchi.
So get everything in there.
[dish sizzling]
Add all of the juices from the kimchi container.
Try to deglaze the pan
with some of the juices that we just put in.
Add a little of the gochujang.
So if you think about it
almost like tomato paste if you will,
it's going to be kind of the base
of the jjigae in terms of flavor.
Start with like a tablespoon's worth.
Let's give everything a stir.
Two cups of water.
All the flavor that you developed
gets lifted up from the bottom of the pot.
And as it cooks,
it will also exude its own liquid from the kimchi.
So with any soup, you wanna bring to boil,
cover with the lid, slightly ajar,
and then we'll reduce it to simmer for like 15-20 minutes
until the kimchi really kind of loses its shape.
Oh my gosh.
It should be this level of gurgling, bubbling boilingness.
I'm just gonna take a quick little taste.
Hot, spicy, tart.
Oh my gosh, so good.
I'm adding my tofu.
The goal is to warm up the tofu,
just make it a part of the soup, bring it up to temperature,
but it's basically done.
Cut the heat.
Just cover it with a mound of the chopped greens.
Keep everything piping hot.
Make sure you get a little bit of everything,
the pork, the kimchi, the tofu, the fresh greens.
So this is my five-ingredient kimchi-jjigae,
relying heavily on very ripe kimchi.
Like all Korean soups, it's meant to be enjoyed with rice.
My God, again, punchy, spicy,
the bone really helps drive home that base flavor.
And I can't even tell you how deeply flavored this is.
And again, in no small part, due to the very ripe kimchi.
We had such versatile ingredient,
a perfect way to use it up in one pot.
[upbeat music]
The soup I'm making,
it's basically just some really good stock that I have
that I defrosted from the freezer, half beef, half pork.
Yeah, what I like about this
is it's kind of like a memory of mine,
a nostalgic kind of like Italian, simple soup
where it's just like a light brodo with some noodles
and some cheese.
And shallots are, you know, like the onion.
Kind of a great base for a lot of cooking.
I tend to really like
the slightly mild sweetness of a shallot.
It's just a beautiful type of onion in my opinion.
Real thin kind of little slices, okay?
[cutting board scratching]
But we'll sweat them, we'll brown them out,
but they'll kind of wrap around, you know,
give you a little substance.
Because we don't have a ton of ingredients in this soup,
you know, I kind of want the onions to be a part of it.
Give you a little bit of some flavor for sure,
and then also a little substance in the soup itself.
And then some garlic, all right?
Let's open this bad boy right up.
[garlic cracking]
We're gonna do three cloves.
So I like to just nip off that little wooded
kind of root end there.
Makes peeling a little easier.
I usually just crush it, you know?
But we're gonna try to get those nice little slices.
And see we got a little boo-boo on there,
we're gonna nip that right off.
Not my finger, the boo-boo on the...
[Crew Member] What happened to your finger?
Thought you'd never ask.
I'm glad you still care.
I was spearfishing for blackfish, tautog,
shot a bunch, brought them home.
We were having some good times having dinner.
Couple one, two, tree co*cktails.
We're doing this technique where you take the fish,
you hold them, instead of scraping the scales off,
you hold the head, you can cut the scales off of the skin.
The knife skip, and it went,
cut me right down to the knuckle, right to the bone.
Big old flapper.
We just put a little neosporin in,
some electrical tape on that bad boy.
And still kind of a pain in the ass.
Anyway, garlic will burn a lot faster then say shallot.
It's a quick burner.
Little finger bath.
[water running]
Put a little bit of olive oil in there.
Then we're gonna add our sliced shallots.
And again, I don't wanna,
maybe pick up a little bit of color,
however, just sweat it out a little bit.
And yeah, I don't mind a little bit of color on these,
but not too, too much.
The last thing you wanna do,
especially on a simple soup like this or anything,
if you burn it, you start over.
It's a little bit of color,
a little bit of that Maillard reaction happening
where you're gonna pick up a little bit of those
caramelization notes, flavors.
Give us just a skoosh more depth of flavor
in this rather simple soup.
All right, I like to keep them right in the middle like that
when I'm doing onions or shallots.
Sliced garlic going in real quick.
Let's hit it with the broth,
'cause things are getting a little toasty.
So we're gonna let this come up to temp,
get a little hot, get it nice.
And we're gonna do our ditalini.
All right.
We'll do half a bag.
That's the stuff right there, okay?
Ditalini.
Oh heavens, I forgot to salt the water.
That's right, add enough in there just like that.
Make it taste like the ocean.
Microplane a little garlic right into here.
Yeah, so the Microplane
is just gonna give us a nice paste, you know?
Allows it to kind of wrap itself throughout the whole soup.
Maybe wrap isn't the best description.
Immerse.
Incorporate.
That smells good, huh?
We're simmering, we're chilling out,
and we're not reserving any pasta water,
we don't need it for today's application.
So I like to put a little parm down.
Nice little bedding of parm for our broth
and our noodles to lay on.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the stuff.
Little black pepper.
Yeah.
Come on.
Alright, lemme get the soup.
It smells good.
Nice garlic, shallot.
Good broth.
King of cheese, ditalini, where could we go wrong?
Oh, that looks good.
Simple soup for the New Yorker's soul.
Come on, buddy.
Look at you, huh?
You look great.
[pepper mill cracking]
Little boop-boop.
And there we have it, our simple, five-ingredient soup
It's delicious.
Good, kind of a full-bodied stock there, right?
A lot of richness, a lot of flavor, a lot of nutrients.
And then you're getting your comfort,
Your cheesy, brodoey, peppery,
king of cheese Parmesan noodles.
I mean it's kind of perfect.
So good even I can make it.
[upbeat music]
Today, I'm making gingery vegetable dumpling soup.
I definitely make this soup
whenever I want like a quick desk lunch situation
and I'm working from home.
It's really fast, and so I can spend
majority of the time that I'm taking for my lunch break
eating the lunch and not making it.
I'm gonna add four cups of water,
which happens to be the amount that I need
for one cube of chicken bouillon,
but you could use as much or as little,
and scale this up or down
depending on how many people you're trying to feed.
Put the heat on high.
To keep things fast, I wanna allow the aromatics
to sort of steep into the water.
Go in with the scallion.
And then
I'm gonna go in with ginger that's been thinly sliced.
You should be able to smell the ginger and scallion.
It literally is like a ginger scallion tea at this point.
And then we're gonna add chicken bouillon to it.
I could definitely like nibble on this throughout the day.
It's like a [foreign] cheese in my mind.
It's obviously insanely salty, which is why I like it,
but it's just like a ton of flavor in this little cube,
and the resulting stock is something that I would drink.
You can just stir it around to encourage it to dissolve.
The water's really hot, obviously,
so it'll happen pretty quickly.
We'll just see the color of the water change
from like a murky clear to like a nice, pale, golden broth.
So I don't see the cube anymore
which means it's all nice and dissolved.
Ooh
That's so nice.
You get the like warming
hit of ginger at the back of your throat.
I'm gonna go in with a little bit of extra kosher salt.
Add the vegetable dumplings,
usually for like four cups of stock,
they're gonna cook for like two to three minutes
for them to completely defrost
and be nicely warmed through without being overcooked.
Add the greens from the scallion.
I don't want them to sort of like completely break down,
I want them to stay kind of nice and bright green.
And if you add them too early,
the longer they cook sort of they'll get brown
and wilty, and I don't really want that.
On high heat and at a rolling boil,
the dumpling should only take
like two to three minutes to cook.
So once that's done, I'm just gonna plate it up.
That's literally it.
The dumplings are nice and cooked through.
These pieces of ginger and scallion
are gonna be really nice to tip on.
Finish it with a little bit of lime juice
just to brighten it up a bit.
Add some black pepper, too, because I like it.
This is my five-ingredient dumpling soup.
Okay, so usually I'll split one of the dumplings in half,
and the filling sort of just like seeps out into the broth.
I hope it's not too hot.
We'll find out.
It's just so good.
In all of that time,
you've like built a decent amount of flavor into the stock.
The dumplings are like super bouncy.
The fillings sort of like seeps out
into the rest of the broth, so they're like the sort of
substantial heft behind this soup.
It's simple, it's easy.
I have a big sweater on right now.
The vibes are right.
[upbeat music]
Today I'm making my creamy curried tomato soup.
So it's tomato soup that you may have grown up on
like very familiar, very comforting,
but doctored up with a little bit of red curry paste.
I love a little bit of spice in my food.
I think it jolts flavors awake.
So using a spicy red curry paste
to me in tomato soup felt like a no-brainer.
I'm adding the thick part of the coconut milk from the can.
You can always chill the coconut milk first,
and that way the fat will really solidify on top.
Add a few tablespoons of curry paste.
Turn the heat on.
Whisk this to combine.
Essentially what I'm doing here is cooking the curry paste.
As the coconut milk heats up, the fat is going to split
and start toasting the curry paste.
You can see it's slowly starting to turn a little darker,
so that's the fat slowly heating up, rendering.
This part I think is pretty important to the soup
because as you cook that curry paste in the coconut fat,
it blooms the spices, and it doesn't taste as raw in the end
and mellows things out a bit.
The fat is now starting to separate way more obviously,
and that's exactly what we are looking for.
So around the edges, it's broken.
Oil is pulling on top.
It's started to become thicker and darker.
Actually, I can really smell it now,
and it smells really good.
If yours is darker than that, then just turn the heat down.
You don't want it to burn.
I'm going to just deglaze
with a little bit of chicken broth.
Once you add the rest of the liquid and simmer it,
it's all going to get in there.
Add the rest of my coconut milk.
This just makes it really creamy,
and just mellows everything out a little bit
without needing to use like a lot of heavy cream.
Next, I'm going to add the tomatoes.
I prefer whole peeled tomatoes
as opposed to like a tomato sauce or diced ones
just because I think the texture is better.
Once this simmers for a while and all the flavors mingle,
then we're going to blend it, and it's going to become
that creamy soup of your childhood dreams.
Add onions, add a pat of, well,
a couple pats of butter, which is my freebie ingredient.
And this is kind of like Marcella's famous tomato sauce
where she just dumps tomatoes, half an onion,
and butter in a pan and lets it simmer.
This is inspired by that.
It just becomes tender and melty as it simmers.
Hit it with a little bit of salt.
It's bubbling around the edges,
so I'm going to cover it, keep it at this temperature,
reducing the heat if I need to to maintain it at a simmer.
If you can cut through the onion easily with a spoon,
that means it's tender, and it's exactly where we want.
This is how it looks after about 10 minutes of cooling down.
You can use an immersion blender.
I like the Vitamix,
not only because it makes it extra creamy,
but also really emulsifies the coconut fat in the soup.
It takes on this slightly orangey hue,
but most importantly, it makes it really smooth and velvety.
This is my favorite texture of tomato soup.
Perfectly creamy.
And I'm going to finish it off with a crack of black pepper,
which is on my freebie list.
Picture-perfect tomato soup.
Extremely silky.
Just the way I like it.
All in all for five ingredients, a lot of flavor.
All thanks to the curry paste.
Now can I just eat without speaking?
[Shilpa laughing]
[upbeat music]
As soon as the temperature drops
by 10 degrees in New York, like I start making this soup.
It is just so weeknight friendly, it's flavorful,
it's comforting, and I almost always have
all of these things in my pantry.
The first thing I'm gonna do is make a quick dashi.
I have already kickstarted the process.
There is a piece of kombu in here.
I have water already simmering in this pot.
Kombu is so important when making this soup
and making a dashi because this has a ton of flavor.
It is going to taste like the sea,
which is the beautiful part of this dashi.
And here I have my bonito flakes.
This is just pieces of bonito fish
that are sliced paper-thin.
Dashi is a base broth
that is used in tons of Japanese soups and stews.
Stir that around.
We're gonna let that steam for a little bit,
and then strain everything.
The color will change slightly to like a greenish yellow,
and you will immediately start smelling fishy,
kind of like seafood smell.
The fragrance is just so like comforting,
and there's no way you're gonna eat this
and be like, That's bland.
That won't happen.
Turn that up.
Once the dashi starts to bubble, I'm gonna add my miso.
Put this in a strainer.
Miso is made with fermented soybeans.
Use it to kind of dissolve the miso into the dashi,
and that way we are ensuring that there will be no chunks.
So look how easily it kind of just
dissolves into this broth.
Add wakame, which is also a type of seaweed.
It will like slowly expand,
and change its color to like the stock green.
Add some chunks of silken tofu.
I'm gonna check the seasoning.
It's perfect.
I'm so excited, like this soup is just the best.
So I didn't really use any of the freebie ingredients,
but in traditional miso soup,
it is topped with some green scallions,
so I am going to top mine as well.
And there you have it,
a beautiful bowl of five-ingredient miso tofu soup.
It's somehow light, but it's also hearty.
It's just like the perfect balance between the two.
There's just so much flavor in this broth.
It's just like everything you want in a bowl of soup.
[upbeat music]
You know, grandma Leoni always said
On a hot day drink a hot bowl of soup, cool you right off.
I don't know, man.
