Often quite handy: ready-made canned or bag soup. Don’t let it cook on the label. Why not? If I make soup myself, do I always let it go through?
On the Online Forum Reddit is stated A series of hilarious answersoften not neat enough to repeat here. It comes down to taste that you ‘cook’, vegetables that turn into pulp, sifting cream and a burnt mouth.
We email with manufacturer Zwanenberg, producer of soup brand Unox. “Cooking can lead to a taste loss and can influence the texture: ingredients become mushy,” is the answer. “And thicker lobbling soups are going to simmer, which causes a splash and combustion hazard.”
Bright. But you also continue to cook homemade soup? We call with NRC chef Janneke Vreugdenhil. “If I make soup myself, I will cook everything as short as possible,” she says, “which means that your ingredients add at different times. When the soup is ready, you should not cook it further, because then you will lose taste and texture.” As an example she mentions soup with vermicelli: you cook those strings until porridge if your cooked soup is cooked again.
But for the advanced soup chemistry, we have to call Chef Eke Mariën from the platform according to Vreugdenhil Cook with knowledgethat science embraces as a basis for tastier cooking. “Manufacturers deliver a fully controlled product: the soup is already cooked and safe, precisely tailored to taste, texture and binding,” he says. “Extra cooking does not add anything, but can lead to unwanted effects: starches and binders lose their strength and fleeting aromas.”
Cooking can change the properties of molecules: starch binds to water and becomes gelatinousor falls apart. That changes the structure of the soup. And proteins can solidify, which changes structure and taste. Also vitamins, especially C and B, break down. That vegetables become soft, because the pectin (a sugar molecule that holds the plant cells together) and hemicellulose (a component of the cell wall) fall apart at higher temperatures.
“Cooking at home is something very different from cooking to keep what manufacturers do,” Mariën emphasizes. “At home you can still intervene or adjust the taste. Soup from the pot must be perfect like it is in the pot.”
And one pot is not the other, says Michel Jansen van Smallest soup factory. It makes ‘real’ soup, which is made smaller and ‘with attention’, and is sold in glass jars. Those soups are cooked as short as possible, Jansen explains, and after packaging briefly sterilized and then quickly cooled. “You can still garnish our soup with fresh ingredients and let it cook well,” he says, “for example, to let an egg cook in your minestrone. Furthermore, we use extra strong starches based on corn or tapioca, and oils with a high oil acid content. That makes them very stable with heating.”
We will definitely try that soup. But first to see what happens with ‘normal’ pea soup-from-tin. We heat one half to the eett temperature. Not high, but great for a rush family. We cook the other half for ten minutes. With lid on it, because it splashes like a volcano. The soup becomes thinner and foams, the leek becomes slimy and the taste a bit flat. Not recommended.
NEW: Give this article as a gift
As an NRC subscriber you can do every month 10 articles Give a gift to someone without an NRC subscription. The recipient can read the article directly, without a payment wall.